The social media giant’s statistics showed that smartphone based transactions are rapidly rising.
Newly released Kantar and Facebook mobile commerce data revealed a sizeable trend toward smartphone transactions. Over the holiday shopping period, the social media giant recorded 51 percent of transactions from smartphone or tablet sources.
This data included the period from November 1 through December 31 based on online transactions.
During that same period in 2015, the same figure had been a notably lower 41 percent. As a whole, this Facebook mobile commerce data underscored the importance for retailers to pay close attention to this trend and ensure they are accessible to consumers through their preferred devices.
This type of data could potentially change the way that retailers spend their time and money trying to interact with consumers.
The Facebook mobile commerce study also revealed a number of other key findings.
• Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are shortening the length of a consumer’s shopping journey. This includes everything from the decision to investigate a type of product to the completion of the purchase transaction. Among the customers who had bought something online, users who had seen a retail ad over mobile took about 6.7 days from that time to make their purchase. That was 1.08 days faster than the rate of action from desktop retail shoppers. This represents a 13 percent faster shopping journey for m-commerce users.
• Facebook remains an important retailer platform. Among American retail shoppers who had bought something in the 3 months before August 2016, 30 percent had used Facebook and discovered a new product. About one in three respondents said that Facebook and Instagram were good sources of information regarding new products. One in five respondents said they’d used Facebook as a path to purchasing something online.
The study aligns closely with the findings from other data and research presented over the last few years as well as for the 2016 holiday shopping season. Purchases made over desktop and laptop computers have maintained a steady 21 percent growth over the last couple of years.
That said, Facebook mobile commerce and comScore data indicates that the smartphone and tablet based shopping has increased by a tremendous 114 percent during that time.
