When compared to the same day in 2013, m-commerce was found to have broken many records.
Holiday shopping is already off with a bang over every channel, and PayPal has now released some of the statistics with regards to the mobile payments that it processed, starting on Thanksgiving Day.
What it showed was that its processing as a result of m-commerce is off to a great start in 2014.
From that day alone, the company reported that it saw an increase of 56 percent in the global mobile payments volume that it experienced, when compared to the volume that was recorded in 2013. It also stated that there had been a 43 percent increase in m-commerce shopping this year on Thanksgiving, over last year on the same day.
Regardless of the time zone differences around the world, the biggest mobile payments spike occurred within a small time window.
The largest amount of m-commerce activity that was experienced by PayPal on Thanksgiving was between 1pm PT (4pm ET) and 2pm PT (5pm ET). That single window showed the most important level of shopping over mobile devices on the entire day, around the world, despite the differences in time zone.
That said, this is not the largest amount of growth that PayPal has ever seen on a single Thanksgiving day when comparing usage from one year to the next. Last year, it reported a worldwide growth of 91 percent on that day over PayPal mobile, when compared to the figure that had been recorded on that day in 2012.
According to Pablo Rodriguez, the head of global consumer initiatives at PayPal, who discussed the comparatively slowed growth, “I think it speaks to the widening of the holiday shopping net or the holiday creep.” Rodriguez also explained that the holiday season didn’t really get started on Thanksgiving itself, this year, but that people were already out and buying as well as hunting for bargains on September 30, according to his own data.
Moreover, many retailers launched pre-Thanksgiving and Black Friday deals that started on November 21, which meant that the spending using mobile payments for the same types of sale were spread out over a larger number of days, this year, when compared to last year.
