Black Friday has become not only a shopping day par excellence, but also a sort of cultural experience, complete with video recaps of people crashing the doors of major retailers — and sometimes crashing into each other.
But things may be changing. This year, those Black Friday shoppers stayed on the couch instead of getting behind the wheel.
“Mobile shopping accounted for well over a third of all online shopping on Black Friday 2015 in the U.S., some 36.1 percent according to e-commerce analytics firm Custora,” reports Forbes. “That’s up from 30.3 percent last year. Keeping with the longstanding trend for mobile commerce, the vast majority of those mobile customers were also iPhone users.”
Reportedly, 77 .6 percent of all orders made on mobile devices took place on iPhones or iPads, while only 22.1 percent were placed via Android devices.
“The good news for Android is that its share of the pie is up slightly from 19.5 percent of orders last year,” noted Forbes.
Google may lament that Apple mobile devices are in the lead for the buying of goods and services (despite Android’s dominance of global market share for smartphone platforms).
But — “iOS is for selling product, and Android is for advertising,” suggests Forbes contributor Ayo Omojola.
In short, mobile is making inroads — the kind that could turn the classic definition of Black Friday on its head.
And what about sales?
“In retail stores, sales on Black Friday dropped to $10.4 billion this year from $11.6 billion last year, according to shopping analytics firm ShopperTrack,” according to Forbes.
