The holiday season has started and consumers start hearing from their favorite retailers about what they have to offer for the 2017 holiday season.
According to new research by Adobe Digital Insights, online retail visits have been experiencing slow growth in the past two years. However, certain retail segments, including apparel and consumer electronics, have been doing better than others.
Here are the most interesting stats, as well as consumption numbers from holiday 2016, to paint a picture of what online shopping looks like today.
1. Smartphones accounted for 41% of online retail visits and 21% of sales during holiday 2016.
2. During the holiday 2016 period, 56 out of 61 days resulted in over $1 billion in revenue.
3. Holiday 2016 saw that desktop visits converted at 2.4 times the rate of smartphone visits, indicating that consumers still relied on their smartphones to research and then opt for the desktop to transact. According to ADI, it was a $4.5 billion opportunity cost.
4. Fast forward to today and, so far, online retailers have seen 4% more visits than last year.
5. Smartphone visits to retail sites in Q4 2017 are expected to overtake the desktop by about 0.09%.
6. Consumer still make the majority of their online retail purchases via desktop, accounting for nearly 70% of all online purchases in Q2 2017.
7. While consumers like to browse on mobile devices, smartphones accounted for just over 20% of online retail sales in Q2 2017.
8. Tablets accounted for less than 10% of online revenue share in Q2 2017.
9. Total online sales for holiday 2016 (Nov. 1 to Dec. 31) were over $90 billion.
10. The number of visits to retail sites from smartphones has more than doubled since January 2015.
11. Apparel retailers are seeing a higher number of visits coming from smartphones than other retail categories.
12. A desktop visit to a retail site is worth about four times as much as a smartphone visit.
13. Compared with Q2 2016, retailers did a much better job at keeping people on their sites in Q2 2017. Visit duration increased by 1.2% YoY for all retailers.
14. Social referrals to retail sites have more than doubled since January 2015, but they still represent a very small percentage (3%) of overall referrals to retail sites. Natural search brings in the most referrals (41%).
15. Consumer electronics retailers are struggling with site “stickiness”—or the ability to keep people on their websites—most notably, on smartphones.
The research used Adobe Analytics to comb through more than 50 billion visits to over 250 retail websites between January 2015 and June 2017.
