Buried beneath the boring holiday headlines – if a year of record breaking digital commerce growth of 34% can be called boring – is a real and newsworthy shift. That is, shoppers have unified their shopping. This year marked the first time ever that the biggest digital day was the biggest shopping day, as Black Friday muscled Cyber Monday out of the top spot. In another step towards unified commerce, shoppers are making the boundaries between channel look artificial.
These are just some of the findings of our annual deep dive, All Wrapped Up, into the crucial peak shopping season.
Other findings including where consumers shopped. The answer to that is – wherever they wanted. Shoppers made this the first mobile-first shopping season with 52% of all traffic coming from phones. And those mobile visits were much more social than ever before, with 6% of mobile visits starting in social. Social media graduated this year, transforming into a legitimate shopping channel. The chart below, one of many in the report, shows overall revenue growth by region over the peak period.
One key learning gleaned from monitoring shopping activity over the years is that, while the peak shopping season may fall at the end of the year, shoppers have proven that it is really the beginning. Cyber Week and the big weeks that follow set the tone for the next twelve months of shopping, establishing the new normal for shopping behavior, as the intense period of shopping leads consumers to adopt new technologies and shopping habits.The migration to mobile and increased use of social media as a gateway to commerce are clear examples that the shopping season is a harbinger of what’s to come in the year ahead
In this year’s All Wrapped Up report, we recap the Christmas Holiday shopping season across more than one billion visits and 300 million shoppers. There’s much more, including the new Cyber Week rules, mobile, social and digital’s best infographic – all inside All Wrapped Up. Download it today.