The shift in retail strategies has allowed for consumers to change up their shopping behaviors combining an in-store and online shopping experience. With the first rush of the holiday shopping season done, retailers are offering their most aggressive promotions and deals of the year. And this holiday season is shorter than average with only 28 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Consumers are now less restricted to the traditional shopping holidays – retailers are starting their promotions earlier, consumers are shopping when, wherever and by whatever channel they choose. The trend for the past few years has been for consumers to spend more online during the holiday season. For this 2014 holiday season, Forrester projects that consumers will spend $89 million online this November and December. 
Artisan Mobile conducted research that concluded 91% of consumers are planning to make mobile or tablet app purchases this holiday season. A NRF survey found that 45% of consumers that own smartphones plan to use them for research purposes.
Thanksgiving day alone showed that research to be true with mobile accounting for over half of online traffic.
Some interesting stats from the first holiday shopping burst over Thanksgiving:
- IBM reports that mobile devices were stronger this year than utilization of PC’s with accounting for 52.1% of online traffic
- Best Buy’s website crashed due to the high traffic volume over the Thanksgiving holiday
- Walmart claimed that 25 million people downloaded their Black Friday ad while 20 million customers used the store locator on their website
- Target offered a pre-sale this year, both in-store and online and recorded online sales having exceeded total sales from last year by 9am on the same day last year.
As Christmas approaches in two weeks, we will be following the industry closely to see if mobile continues to stay the strongest channel for online traffic (research and purchase).
Will you be using your smartphone this holiday season?
