Mobiles driving 52 percent of online fashion sales this Christmas

Mobile phones are driving fashion shopping this festive season, accounting for 67 percent of traffic to fashion retail sites and 52 percent of online sales revenue, according to new research.

Conversion rates on phones also jumped 53 percent higher since last year as consumers become more comfortable shopping with their mobiles and retailers work on better utilising personalisation technologies.

That’s according to an early analysis of global fashion shopping habits by AI-powered e-commerce personalisation platform Nosto which analysed millions of shopping visits to fashion sites globally across the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, offering an early indicator of fashion shopping trends this holiday season.

But mobile shoppers are seemingly less inclined to make a purchase than those using desktops. While the conversion rate for people using phones to shop for fashion increased from 2.18 percent in 2018 to 3.33 percent this year, it still remained half that of desktop shoppers (6.2 percent).

Additionally, holiday shoppers using their phones are spending nearly 9 percent less per purchase on average than those on computers. They also spend less time on websites and are 10 percent more likely to abandon their shopping cart before completing a purchase compared to computer users (76 percent vs 66 percent).

Commenting on the figures in a statement, Jim Lofgren, CEO of Nosto, said: “As they’re making shorter visits on a smaller screen, you’d expect mobile fashion shoppers to be harder to convince to make a purchase and to be less likely to place larger orders - which we see in the data. But now that online fashion shopping is overwhelmingly mobile, being successful as a retailer comes down to having a truly mobile-first mentality - making it easy for shoppers to find their way around your site and quickly find just the products they want, and to check out with minimum effort.

“That’s where using artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive personalisation comes in. You can maximise the space and time on a mobile phone screen by automatically showing shoppers the most relevant shopping experience based on their behaviour - all in real-time. In fact, it’s now possible to instantly change the layout of the page and ensure shoppers are seeing the most appropriate images, offers and related content that might interest them.”

Across all devices, Nosto recorded a 15 percent increase year-on-year in traffic to fashion retail sites over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as well as a 78 percent jump in online sales.

Lofgren continued: "The numbers suggest there's more opportunity than ever for fashion retail to build online sales in the run-up to the holidays. But you have to make sure you're delivering the best experiences you can to truly embrace that fact.”

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