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Black Friday mobile shoppers set single-day record

Consumers relied on their smartphones to find the best deals on Black Friday.

November 26, 2018

Consumers continued the push toward mobile shopping as data from Adobe Analytics reported more than $2.1 billion in sales from smartphones.

The Black Friday performance blew away the prior record for of $1.4 billion in mobile sales from Cyber Monday 2017. Adobe reported that 33.5 percent of Black Friday sales were made on smartphones this year, compared with $29.1 percent made on smartphones in the year-ago Black Friday sales date.

Adobe officials said the performance was an indication that retailers were doing a better job of customizing their mobile shopping technology to attract online shoppers.

"Retailers have done their part to build better mobile experiences for customers and turning nearly 10 percent more smartphone visitors into buyers this Black Friday versus last," Taylor Schreiner, director of Adobe Digital Insights said in a company announcement.

Overall, consumers spent $6.22 billion on Black Friday, representing a 23.6 percent increase from the year-ago period.

The report also found that the trend of buying online but picking up in store (BOPIS) grew by 73 percent from Thursday to Friday and that Cyber Monday 2018 was expected to be the biggest online shopping day in history, with more than $7.8 billion sales, a 17.6 percent year-over-year performance.

Mobile conversion

A spokesperson from mobile commerce platform Shopgate said the average conversion rate on its apps more than doubled on Black Friday and that the most widely used payment method on Black Friday was PayPal Express.  This was followed by traditional credit card payment processors, primarily authorize.net.

PayPal accounted for 51 percent of payments, with PayPal Express, which includes both mobile and card, accounting for 36 percent, 15 percent credit card/PayPal website payments pro. about 6 percent of orders were placed through Apple Pay.

After studying data from a sample of 500 merchants using its platform for native apps, Shopgate said orders were split almost evenly between iPhone and Android apps.  Average order values, however, on iPhones were 15 percent higher than Androids.

Photo: iStock