Consumers collectively invest decades in mobile shopping during Black Friday

Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - 12:16 by Paul Tissington

The Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale period may be over for another year, but the analysis of the event is only just getting underway, with figures from Poq looking at just how much time was taken up by m-commerce apps.

It is estimated that people across the UK and the US spent a combined total of almost 22 years browsing offers available via safe shopping online from their smartphones. This is a 40 per cent uptick in usage compared with 2017, according to Internet Retailing.

This in turn led to a 300 per cent increase in the amount of revenue generated by e-commerce sales across both mobile and desktop platforms.

Britain dominated in terms of the proportion of deals which were snapped up online, while as a whole the rise of mobile apps allowed for just over a third of m-commerce revenue to be earned via these dedicated standalone programs.

Report spokesperson Oyvind Henriksen said that consumers were more confident in their use of apps than ever before, leading more to make purchases from this type of platform rather than heading to retail websites.

He also said that in many cases an app provided a more convenient, consistent experience than a mobile site. This is because retailers can more closely control the experience of using an app, whereas a website’s performance can be more varied according to a number of different factors.

This year 89 per cent of people who shopped over the Cyber Weekend using an app did so from a platform they had previously harnessed in the past. This suggests that there is a level of loyalty amongst consumers, or at least a degree of trust placed on retailers that have proved themselves previously and thus earned repeat business.