IBM projects another strong shopping season with online sales projected to increase 15 percent over the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday - part of IBM's predictions for the 2014 holiday shopping season based on billions of online and in-store transactions analyzed by the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark and IBM Quarterly Retail Forecast.
The biggest increase in online sales is expected on Cyber Monday, predicted to grow 15.8 percent, followed closely by Thanksgiving with a projected increase of 15.6 percent.
Still widely considered the busiest day for in-store shopping, Black Friday online sales are expected to grow 13 percent as consumers find the best deals with their fingers as well as their feet.
A primary driver of online growth, mobile browsing is expected to account for 48.2 percent of all online traffic over the five-day period, an increase of 23 percent over last year.
Mobile sales are also expected to rise, accounting for 24.4 percent of all online sales, up 9.5 percent year-over-year.
Apple’s dominance in mobile shopping experiences is also expected to continue with iOS device traffic projected to double that of Android devices, and sales expected to quadruple.
Today’s predictions are based on historical and real-time trend data analyzed across hundreds of U.S. retail websites.
Other key predictions for this year’s U.S. holiday shopping season include:
■ Mobile is the New Thanksgiving Tradition: For the first time ever, IBM predicts more than half of all online shopping on Thanksgiving, roughly 53 percent, will come from a mobile device, up 23 percent year-over-year. Mobile sales are also expected to grow, reaching 28 percent of all Thanksgiving online sales, an increase of more than 9 percent over 2013. (1)
■ More Digital Coupons, Greater Savings for Consumers: As consumers become more comfortable with digital couponing, IBM predicts shoppers will save dollars this holiday season as they cash in on online deals. Consumers will spend on average $123.28 per online order over the five-day holiday period, a decrease of 2.9 percent over 2013. At the same time, the average number of items included in those purchases will be 4.4 items per order, an increase of 17 percent year-over-year. (1)
■ Retailers Give the Gift of Less Spam: IBM predicts click-through rates for emails sent during the five-day shopping period will be 10 percent higher than the same period last year, thanks to data-driven insight which allows marketers to reduce the amount of unwanted email and instead, deliver personalized and relevant promotions. The company also estimates that 35 percent of all click-throughs will happen on a mobile device. The highest volume of emails is expected on Cyber Monday. (2)
■ Smartphones Browse, Tablets Buy: Smartphones will continue to lead in mobile browsing over the five-day shopping period, accounting for 29 percent of all online traffic versus 15 percent for tablets. However, IBM predicts tablets will account for twice as many mobile purchases than smartphones thanks to the larger screen size. (1)
Data Sources
(1) Delivered through IBM ExperienceOne, IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark analyzes hundreds of terabytes of real-time shopping across participating US websites. The resulting insight – based on 370 performance indicators – helps retailers benchmark themselves against industry peers while driving more targeted customer engagements.
(2) Denotes Silverpop-specific data not included in the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark report. Silverpop, an IBM Company, is a cloud-based digital marketing provider that offers email marketing and lead management solutions. The research examined messages sent by Silverpop's global client base, combining data from a variety of brands and message types. Messages include promotional emails, content-based newsletters, notifications and transactional emails.
Payal Chakravarty is Senior Product Manager for IBM Application Performance Management.
The Latest
To help you stay on top of the ever-evolving tech scene, Automox IT experts shake the proverbial magic eight ball and share their predictions about tech trends in the coming year. From M&A frenzies to sustainable tech and automation, these forecasts paint an exciting picture of the future ...
Incident management processes are not keeping pace with the demands of modern operations teams, failing to meet the needs of SREs as well as platform and ops teams. Results from the State of DevOps Automation and AI Survey, commissioned by Transposit, point to an incident management paradox. Despite nearly 60% of ITOps and DevOps professionals reporting they have a defined incident management process that's fully documented in one place and over 70% saying they have a level of automation that meets their needs, teams are unable to quickly resolve incidents ...
Today, in the world of enterprise technology, the challenges posed by legacy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) systems have long been a source of concern for IT departments. In many instances, this promising solution has become an organizational burden, hindering progress, depleting resources, and taking a psychological and operational toll on employees ...
Within retail organizations across the world, IT teams will be bracing themselves for a hectic holiday season ... While this is an exciting opportunity for retailers to boost sales, it also intensifies severe risk. Any application performance slipup will cause consumers to turn their back on brands, possibly forever. Online shoppers will be completely unforgiving to any retailer who doesn't deliver a seamless digital experience ...
Black Friday is a time when consumers can cash in on some of the biggest deals retailers offer all year long ... Nearly two-thirds of consumers utilize a retailer's web and mobile app for holiday shopping, raising the stakes for competitors to provide the best online experience to retain customer loyalty. Perforce's 2023 Black Friday survey sheds light on consumers' expectations this time of year and how developers can properly prepare their applications for increased online traffic ...
This holiday shopping season, the stakes for online retailers couldn't be higher ... Even an hour or two of downtime for a digital storefront during this critical period can cost millions in lost revenue and has the potential to damage brand credibility. Savvy retailers are increasingly investing in observability to help ensure a seamless, omnichannel customer experience. Just ahead of the holiday season, New Relic released its State of Observability for Retail report, which offers insight and analysis on the adoption and business value of observability for the global retail/consumer industry ...
As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, many are leaning toward hybrid cloud as a solution ... While it's true that using the cloud is not a "one size fits all" proposition, it is clear that both large and small companies prefer a hybrid cloud model ...
In the same way a city is a sum of its districts and neighborhoods, complex IT systems are made of many components that continually interact. Observability requires a comprehensive and connected view of all aspects of the system, including even some that don't directly relate to its technological innards ...
Multicasting in this context refers to the process of directing data streams to two or more destinations. This might look like sending the same telemetry data to both an on-premises storage system and a cloud-based observability platform concurrently. The two principal benefits of this strategy are cost savings and service redundancy ...