Mobile applications played a major role in kicking off the holiday shopping season.
This year, more than ever before, shoppers used mcommerce as an important part of their Black Friday shopping, and this included many activities, from price comparisons to hunting for sales, checking inventories, and even making the purchases themselves.
These activities were performed both over apps and mobile optimized websites.
Although there was a great deal of activity overall, some mcommerce apps saw more action than others. For example, Groupon held the leading position as the most used app. At the same time, though, it was Best Buy that experienced the largest single day gains.
These mcommerce statistics were generated by mobile data compression firm, Onavo.
The Sequoia backed startup revealed that there was a spike in the use of the iOS apps from both Best Buy and Walmart by over five times both on Thanksgiving and on Black Friday. Not too far behind were Target, Kohl’s, and ShopSavvy. Notably absent from this data was the use of the Amazon application.
The data for this mcommerce news was gleaned from a sample of approximately 130,000 American iPhone owners. Onavo is a company from Israel, which receives live insight into the application use on a daily basis. It obtains this data from two different consumer products. The first is Onavo Extend, which is a product that assists consumers by compressing their data usage so that they can reduce their mobile bills. The other Is Onavo Count, which informs the device user of how much data is being used.
The company has millions of users of its products, which allows them to narrow down their statistics from large specific samples. Moreover, as the products are consumer facing, so that the company needn’t interact directly with developers, it is capable of publishing mcommerce data on active use for individual apps.
This is what gave it the ability to determine the success of individual apps on Black Friday, and that showed that the highest usage went to Groupon and LivingSocial deal apps, followed by specific retailers, including Walmart, Target, and Red Laser from eBay.
