Mobile commerce sees green on Black Friday

If you're reading this column, it means you survived another Black Friday. Perhaps you avoided the mall altogether, wisely opting to shop online instead: Industry data indicates that mobile phone-based purchases surged this year, with mobile payments processed via PayPal up nearly 650 percent over Black Friday 2008 totals. In addition, product search engine TheFind.com reports that mobile product queries increased year-over-year from roughly 5,000 to about 200,000, in part because wily consumers were using their phones to compare prices while browsing inside brick-and-mortar retail outlets. According to TheFind.com, online retailer Amazon.com generated about six times the number of search hits as big-box giant Wal-Mart, a disparity attributed to Amazon's sweeping price reductions as well as the absence of sales tax on virtual sales.

Consumers weren't just shopping for traditional physical goods over the holiday break. Data issued by mobile ad exchange Mobclix states that traffic to Apple's App Store increased 57 percent during Thanksgiving week compared to the same period in 2008--moreover, App Store traffic grew 43 percent between Nov. 24 and Nov. 30 compared to the first three weeks of the month. Mobclix also notes that iPhone and iPod touch application usage jumped 59 percent on Black Friday 2009, compared to 34 percent growth on Black Friday a year ago. Although games continued to lead App Store downloads over Thanksgiving week, iPhone users also gravitated to shopping and mobile couponing apps as well as social networking and dating apps.

As Black Friday gave way to Cyber Monday, shoppers continued turning to the mobile platform, even if the user experience still isn't quite comparable to the conventional web. According to data compiled by web application experience management services provider Gomez, the average mobile retail website loaded 1.5 seconds slower on Cyber Monday than retailers' traditional home pages. Of the 14 mobile sites Gomez monitored, page load speeds ranged from 2.18 seconds at best to nearly 6 seconds at worst, corresponding to an overall average of 3.7 seconds--almost double the two-second threshold that most customers tell Gomez they're willing to wait before giving up, abandoning the site and seeking out a competitor. Not to downplay the importance of the user experience, but when it comes to the holiday shopping season, it's possible those trigger-happy consumers have some outsized expectations--compared to standing in a seemingly endless department store checkout line, waiting a few extra seconds for a mobile webpage to load doesn't seem so bad. -Jason