e-Commerce

Coronavirus Boosts Black Friday Mobile Shopping and Trounces In-Store Visits

LisaMoshfegh — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 19:07:37 +0000

Coronavirus Boosts Black Friday Mobile Shopping and Trounces In-Store Visits

By Estelle Laziuk, Flurry Analyst

LisaMoshfegh Fri, 12/04/2020 - 11:07

2020-12-04

Tags

Mobile Insights

Holiday Mobile Insights

App Category Insights

e-Commerce

Black Friday is a crucial event for retailers, kicking off the holiday shopping season. According to a recent Google report, however, the pandemic has reduced U.S. retail foot traffic by 20% since May. Additionally, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that growth in consumer spending has been slowing each month since July. These trends paint a grim outlook for battered retailers who were hoping for a strong Black Friday rebound. In this report, we examine how COVID-19 impacted both mobile and in-store shopping from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, including a focus on Black Friday.

Flurry Analytics, owned by Verizon Media, is used in over 1 million mobile applications, providing insights from 2 billion mobile devices per month. For this analysis, Flurry measured mobile shopping activity using sessions. To estimate the change in visits to U.S. retail stores, we averaged the number of active mobile devices in 5 of the country’s largest downtown shopping districts: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco.

Let’s look at how the Black Friday shopping period fared this year compared to last year.

In the chart above, we show the percent change in shopping activity during the period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday from 2019 to 2020. We display the change in shopping visits to retail stores on the left in red, and the change in mobile shopping on the right in blue. Over the five-day shopping period, in-store shopping tumbled by an average of 41% and mobile shopping grew by an average of 19%. Because shopping has been altered so dramatically in 2020, let’s take a closer look at some of the drivers of this year’s outcome.

Retailers Push Consumers to Shop Digitally

This year, in order to accommodate restrictions due to the pandemic, retailers opted for more online deals rather than driving foot traffic into stores. The majority of retailers encouraged consumers to shop online by reducing in-store-only offers and increasing online deals. Adapting this way, we would have anticipated Cyber Monday, which is already the busiest online shopping day of the year, to grow even more during 2020 relative to other days over the long weekend. However, while Cyber Monday mobile shopping did indeed grow this year, other days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday grew more. In 2020, the days that saw the greatest increase for mobile shopping were Black Friday and the Sunday before Cyber Monday, with 24% and 23% respective growth over last year.

We think this happened, in part, because retailers expanded online discount periods during 2020 due to COVID-19. In an effort to stimulate slumping sales, discounts were offered across all five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, rather than just on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The result of this was a pop in per-day mobile shopping growth rates across each of the five days of this shopping period versus prior years. In a prior Flurry report, our analysis showed greater spikes in mobile shopping on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, not across the entire long weekend as we’re seeing this year. The difference in per-day growth rates this year are all within 10 percentage points of each other, which is unusual. Let’s next look at online sales, which include sales from mobile devices.

Record Breaking Online & Mobile Sales

This year’s Cyber Monday broke sales records. Digital revenue, which combines both online and mobile sales, reached $10.8 billion, according to a report by Adobe. That’s a 20% jump over the $9 billion spent digitally on Black Friday last year. While mobile shopping itself didn’t deliver a record growth rate on Cyber Monday, our data reveals that mobile shopping session growth outpaced that of online traffic, with mobile growing by 17% and online by 13% compared to last year. This suggests that among online shopping channels, on-the-go mobile shopping experienced a particularly high growth this year on Cyber Monday. Let’s next look at how Black Friday shopping shifted this year in retail stores.

The Collapse of In-Store Shopping

COVID-19 brought a considerably different Black Friday in-store shopping experience to consumers, from mask requirements to the limited number of shoppers allowed inside stores. With maximum customer capacity restrictions, this year’s wait times in stores were lengthier. Combined with an increased risk of exposure to the virus, these restrictions discouraged retail store trips, which plummeted by 41% during Black Friday week compared to last year. On Black Friday, the day that typically drives the most consumers to shop for limited in-stores deals, in-store visits declined by 40% compared to last year, as many in-store deals shifted online.

Coronavirus pushed this year’s Black Friday shopping online, including on mobile, where shopping grew by 19%. While the pandemic boosted online shopping this year, it also busted in-store visits by 41%. With Coronavirus cases still on the rise, we anticipate a continued concentration in digital shopping, with continued growth specifically on mobile. We’ll continue to update you on mobile shopping and other mobile app and device trends. For the latest reports, subscribe to the Flurry Analytics blog and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn

U.S. In-Store Shopping Rebounds After 26% Drop Due to COVID-19

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 14:40:00 +0000

U.S. In-Store Shopping Rebounds After 26% Drop Due to COVID-19

By Estelle Laziuk, Flurry Analyst

Anonymous Wed, 08/19/2020 - 07:40

2020-08-19

Tags

Mobile Insights

App Category Insights

e-Commerce

The Retail category in the United States has been among the hardest hit during COVID-19. This stands to reason as non-essential businesses were forced to close and consumers sheltered at home. In this report, we look at how in-store shopping behavior has been disrupted over the course of 2020.

Flurry Analytics, owned by Verizon Media, is used in over 1 million mobile applications, providing aggregated insights across more than 2 billion mobile devices per month. For this analysis, Flurry selected a sample of apps used by vendors to process in-store transactions. Since these apps are primarily launched only when transactions are executed, we used app sessions as a proxy for shopping transactions. Let’s start by looking at the shift in shopping activity at retail stores during the pandemic.

In the chart above, we compare monthly in-store payment app sessions in blue against retail store sales in orange, from January through July. Retail store sales are seasonally adjusted by the U.S. Census Bureau and cover a broad range of businesses such as clothing, food, electronics and automotive. The first thing you’ll notice is that in-store payment sessions and retail store sales are strongly related, with a correlation coefficient of 0.7. The more frequently consumers make in-store purchases in our sample of apps, the more sales are generated by retail stores, as measured by the U.S. Census. Among other things, this gives us confidence that we are using a relevant sample from Flurry’s data set. When it comes to a shift in shopping behavior, both the volume and amount in dollars of retail transactions began to decline in March, followed by a strong dip in April, and then a steady upward climb from May to July, indicating a solid rebound. Retail sales were most affected from March to April, declining by 13%. This decline of in-store sales is the biggest drop observed by the Department of Commerce since record-keeping started in 1992. To identify more precisely when shopping behavior changed, let’s drill down to a daily view of in-store payments.

The chart above shows that from March 16 to early April, as states began to issue shelter-in-place orders and close non-essential businesses, in-store payment app sessions declined by 26%. Over the next 4 months, in-store payment app sessions steadily climbed back by 43%. As some retail businesses gradually re-opened with curbside pickup, and many states lifted stay-at-home orders, in-store shopping returned to pre-pandemic levels. One interesting thing that stands out is how the shape of the data changed before versus after shelter-in-place orders were issued. Before, you’ll notice many more blue spikes which denote peak days in payments app usage. After, you’ll see more white dips (and fewer blue spikes) which means payment app usage dropped heavily on many more days. The next chart helps show what’s happening; namely that consumers used to make high volume of payments on the weekend (blue spikes), while once shelter-in-place orders were issued, consumers began to reduce weekend payments (white dips). Let’s take a look.

The chart above shows the average percent change of in-store payment app sessions for each day of the week. We averaged sessions from January 1 to March 15 (pre-shelter-in-place orders) in light blue and from March 16 to August 16 (post-shelter-in-place orders) in dark blue. We chose March 16 as the cut-off date since that’s when the majority of shelter-in-place closures took effect in the U.S. and when in-store consumer transactions began to change. Beginning in mid-March, in-store transactions declined across all days of the week by an average of 10%. The likely cause is that consumers are making fewer in-store transactions in order to avoid in-person contact, which increases the risk of exposure to the virus. Instead, a lot of shopping has shifted online. Additionally, what stands out is that in-store transactions fell the most on weekends, by an average of 19%, compared to 10% on weekdays. We believe that working from home has brought about a new weekly schedule where consumers have more time on weekdays to step out and run errands. As a result, we think consumers began to spread their shopping activities more evenly across the week, to open up more time on weekends for leisure activities, and to avoid weekend crowds.

While in-store shopping transactions and retail sales have recovered substantially since the pandemic first struck, consumers unusually continue to shop less on the weekend than during the week. The long shutdown continues to have a lasting impact on the shopping landscape. With the back-to-school shopping season underway, we’ll continue to monitor trends in shopping behavior at retail stores. To get and share our latest mobile insights, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Shopping Apps: The Bridge Between Bricks and Clicks

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 14:01:08 +0000

Shopping Apps: The Bridge Between Bricks and Clicks

By Jarah Euston, VP of Growth

Anonymous Thu, 12/03/2015 - 06:01

2015-12-03

Tags

Mobile Insights

App Category Insights

e-Commerce

As Flurry from Yahoo reported last year, the proliferation of shopping apps on our mobile devices means every day can be Black Friday. Consumers with a mall in their pockets at all times don’t need to wait for the store to open. In fact, the recent IBM report noted that for the first time in 2015, mobile Black Friday retail traffic surpassed that of desktop at nearly 60% of total. Sales on Cyber Monday beat expectations, according to Adobe, coming in at over $3 billion for the day; 16% more than last year.

These are astounding growth figures for what is surely the world’s most mature consumer market. But what this data misses is the bridge that mobile apps have built between in-store and online commerce during the holiday shopping season.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday: A Bridge Too Far?

To kick it off, we examined the session activity around Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday compared to the activity of the prior week. In 2015, week-over-week session growth on the day before Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Day was down compared to prior years; implying that the jump on mobile holiday shopping wasn’t as strong as previous years. Black Friday saw a similar spike in mobile app activity from the last two years with a 24% increase. This is in line with the data from Adobe and IBM, which noted a 30% increase in mobile Black Friday sales in 2015.

For comparison, week-over-week app activity over the last 30 days is typically around -1% to 1%.

And on the Seventh Day, They Compared Prices

On Saturday and Sunday Americans rested and window shopped, all in preparation for Cyber Monday. Shopping app activity spiked this year the Monday after Thanksgiving with a 16% increase in sessions. This increase was nearly 2x the increase in 2014. What’s more, the 4% spike in activity this year suggests consumers are adapting to the “Cyber Week” promoted by retailers. If Black Friday is the biggest day for brick and mortar stores and Cyber Monday is the online equivalent, the weekend in between seems to belong to apps.

Always-On Shopping

Cyber Monday started a decade ago, after Americans returned to their office Internet connection, focused on buying all the items they saw in stores over the Holiday weekend. What we’re seeing in the smartphone era is the holiday shopping season is starting earlier, and extending later. Commerce is finally in our pockets, and peak shopping days are blurring into every day.

Apps: The New Thanksgiving Tradition (and Shopping is Just Part of the Story)

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 06:16:06 +0000

Apps: The New Thanksgiving Tradition (and Shopping is Just Part of the Story)

By: Mary Ellen Gordon, PhD

Anonymous Tue, 03/31/2015 - 23:16

2013-12-06

Tags

holiday

App Insights

e-Commerce

According to IBM, two out of five online retail visits in the U.S. on Black Friday were made from mobile devices, directly generating more than 20% of online retail sales. On Thanksgiving Day, smartphones and tablets accounted for an even greater share of online retail visits and sales (43% of visits and 26% of sales). These results show the extent to which connected devices now influence retail sales, but Flurry’s own Thanksgiving weekend data demonstrates that our relationships with our smartphones and tablets go well beyond picking up a Black Friday deal while picking at Thanksgiving leftovers.

App usage overall in the U.S. spiked by 25% on Thanksgiving compared to the previous Thursday, and not just as a result of shopping app use. The overall pattern of app usage over the Thanksgiving weekend demonstrates that smartphones and tablets have become the first truly personal computers, changing their function as we change our routines. To illustrate that point in this post, we take an in-depth look at U.S. app session starts from the day before Thanksgiving through to Cyber Monday. We compare Thanksgiving week to the week prior, and also compare those time periods for the two previous years. (By including the weekends prior to Thanksgiving for each year we can distinguish between overall growth in app usage and use that is unique to Thanksgiving weekend.)

The chart below provides a high-level view of how overall app usage has changed from year to year, and changes between the week prior to Thanksgiving and the week of Thanksgiving. The gaps between the green, blue, and gray pairs of lines illustrate the extent to which app usage in the United States has grown year over year, with baseline usage the week before Thanksgiving up by about two-thirds compared to the same time last year, and about triple what it was during November of 2011.

The darker line in each color pair shows Thanksgiving weekend for a particular year while the lighter version shows the prior weekend for that year. The gap between the lighter and the darker lines in a color pair shows the difference in app usage by day between Thanksgiving weekend and the prior weekend. For the past three years, that difference has been greatest on Thanksgiving Day, diminishing to return to normal by Cyber Monday. In 2011 and 2012, U.S. app usage spiked by 20% on Thanksgiving Day compared to the previous Thursday. This year the Thanksgiving spike grew to 25%.

Given mobile devices are so personal, it’s no surprise that they tag along as we enjoy Thanksgiving weekend, but we wanted to understand the drivers behind the Thanksgiving spike in app usage. Is it just mobile shopping? Recipe apps aiding Thanksgiving cooks? Football fans checking stats from the couch? Social networking apps used to stay in touch with family far away? What accounts for the extra app sessions on Thanksgiving?

To find out, we compared app sessions by category for Thanksgiving weekend to the weekend before, focusing on the three days for which there is the biggest difference in overall app use.

The results are shown in the table below. The rows are app categories aggregated across operating systems. The columns show changes in app usage between Thanksgiving week and the same day the previous week for each category. Each cell shows that same comparison between Thanksgiving week and the previous week for the past three years.

For obvious reasons, shopping apps consistently spike over the Thanksgiving period. Interestingly the bump this year wasn’t as large as the one last year; however that should not be interpreted to mean that enthusiasm for shopping apps is waning. On the contrary, between 2012 and 2013, overall use of shopping apps in the week before Thanksgiving grew by about 70%, so the 2013 Thanksgiving spike comes on top of a higher baseline usage level.

App categories beyond shopping that saw spikes in app usage during Thanksgiving week are fairly predictable. Media spiked on Thanksgiving Day in particular – most likely in part because it includes photo and video apps used to record family gatherings. It was also somewhat higher on Wednesday and Friday compared to the previous week.

More time for relaxation probably explains why game apps, which are always popular, enjoyed even more use over the Thanksgiving period than the week before.

What types of apps experience less use on Thanksgiving and the days immediately before and after than during the previous week? Mainly apps associated with things people take a break from over the Thanksgiving holiday: business and education, health, and news.

Travel apps also experience a decline in use Thanksgiving Day and the day after. That may seem counter-intuitive since Thanksgiving weekend is one of the busiest travel periods of the year; however it’s important to remember that people tend to be traveling to familiar places and often staying with relatives or friends so are less likely to need apps for booking hotels and rental cars or finding their way around an unfamiliar city.

So shopping does contribute to the spike in app activity on Thanksgiving, but it’s only part of the explanation. This data shows the extent to which smartphones and tablets have become our constant companions, morphing their function to our whims and circumstances in ways even laptops never really did. They are truly our most personal computers. Sure, you can use them to shop without getting out of bed, let alone braving crowds at the mall, but your device can also entertain you with games, music, and movies. It can even tell you how far you need to walk to make up for that second helping of mashed potatoes – if you choose to look.