There was a clear message for the attendees of Dreamforce last week: mobile-only commerce is on the way, and it’s coming sooner than marketers might think.
Speaking at the technology and marketing conference, Rick Kenney, head of consumer insights at the Salesforce-owned Demandware, offered a series of illuminating stats that show just how quickly consumers are adopting mobile commerce.
A global study by Salesforce found that 47% of traffic to retail websites now comes from mobile phones. This year that number edged out desktop traffic (44%) for the first time.
Consumers still tend to complete purchases on computers rather than other devices, however, with 61% of orders coming from desktop compared to 27% from mobile phones. What this means, largely, is that consumers are researching items on their phones, but turning to their desktop when it comes time to check out. According to Kenney, this is largely due to clunky checkout experiences on mobile and consumers not wanting to fill out the multitude of data fields required to make a purchase on their phone. As retailers improve their mobile stores, this will likely change, Kenney said, and drastically increase the volume of mobile orders.
One other key finding from Salesforce’s recent study of global ecommerce is that tablet shopping is quickly fading. Tablets represent just 9% of traffic to retailer sites and 13% of orders, and those numbers are dropping.
“That old media axiom of mobile in the morning, computers during the day, tablets at night is wrong,” Kenney said, noting that tablets are going “the way of the BlackBerry.”
Alexandra Tanner, director of ecommerce at L’Oréal, said that the brand she works on, Giorgio Armani Beauty, is seeing the rapid adoption of smartphones from its customer base and has recently hit the “mobile tipping point.”
Smartphones now represent more than half (54%) of the traffic to Giorgio Armani Beauty’s online store, and 14% more traffic than desktop (40%). Similarly to the overall numbers cited by Kenney, Tanner said the brand still receives more desktop orders (68%) than mobile orders (23%).
In May, the brand did a redesign of its only store, with an eye to a future when mobile is by far the dominant way its customers make purchases. Among the learnings from the redesign is the fact mobile users are happy to scroll. While the conventional wisdom has long been not to bury important information “below the fold,” Tanner said her internal heat maps showed the company’s customers scrolled far deeper on mobile than on desktop.
Throughout the four-day conference, many marketers spoke of a similar progression towards mobile. Steve Akiba, CIO of Party City, for example, said that 55% of that retailer’s traffic is now mobile; up sharply from 45% a year ago. The company is also seeming a boost in its mobile sales, with 25% of web sales coming from mobile devices versus 20% a year ago.
Mark Simmons, head of marketing and ecommerce at Design Within Reach, also spoke about how the furniture retailer is adapting its approach to ecommerce to focus on mobile customers. This spring, the company improved its mobile experience with the launch of a responsive mobile store that resulted in a 44% increase in mobile transactions, a 21% increase in its mobile conversion rate and a 15% increase in the order value of mobile orders.
Kenney predicted that mobile traffic will increase to nearly 60% of all retail site visits by the end of the year. When Salesforce last pulled numbers in the second quarter of this year, 38% of online shopping baskets are started on phones, but by the end of the year, Kenney is predicting shoppers will create more baskets on phones than any other device. And by 2018, he believes those baskets will start converting to orders at a drastic rate, with shoppers placing more orders on phones than any other device by the end of next year.
