More people are shopping on their mobiles

From the archive: originally published on the Eastpoint blog on 22 January 2016. Some details reflect that time.

Mobile ecommerce is often cited as a boom area despite the plateau of online shipping, and this study seems to support that.

Buying on smartphones is now more common

In recent years, it was considered that while more people were using their smartphones to browse, they were more likely to make a purchase on a larger screen, like a laptop or desktop computer.

But according to US developers Moovweb, this is changing. Not only do more people use their phones to browse, but more people are buying on their smartphones, too.

The research was carried out from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday in the US and data was taken from 13.5million shopping visits (the websites tracked was kept confidential).

A 45% increase in traffic and an 81% increase in revenue

According to Moovweb, the amount of smartphone traffic increased by 45% compared to last year, and one in three of their tracked transactions was taken via a mobile device (including tablets).

While this increase is worthy note, what's more interesting is that the extra traffic didn't just account for more browsing. A higher percentage of people were buying, rather than browsing only.

The data tracked by Moovweb showed that smartphone revenue rose by a massive 81%. So while overall traffic increased, the amount of money spent increased by a much larger percentage.

In other words, browsers have become buyers, happy to shop on their smartphone.

Average order value increases too

Moovweb found that the average order value of smartphone purchases did have a small boost of 2%. If shoppers are going to buy on their desktop, this will often be for the higher priced items. This increase could indicate that as well as more people willing to complete their checkout on their phone, they're also happy to do this with higher priced items.

Follow Eastpoint on Twitter