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Takeaways from the 2024 Holiday Shopping Season

Rob Mason
Applause

This past holiday season, my organization, Applause, conducted its fifth annual global survey on holiday shopping trends. With over 7,200 respondents from across the globe, the 2024 holiday shopping season revealed some interesting trends for consumers and retailers.

The Importance of Seamless Ecommerce Experiences

A reliable online shopping experience is becoming increasingly important to consumers, especially at checkout:

  • 26% of respondents said they would abandon an online purchase if they encountered a bug at any point during the experience.
  • 63% of respondents said they would abandon their shopping carts after a maximum of two purchase attempts, with 18% willing to try a third time.
  • Consumers are more likely to abandon a purchase at checkout (28%) than at any other part of the online shopping journey.

Evolving Payment Options

Consumers are continuing to diversify the way they make purchases, both in store and online — and if their preferred payment method isn't accepted, it's likely a dealbreaker:

  • 52% of respondents said they have started using a new payment method within the last year, such as a digital wallet, cryptocurrencies, and EFTs.
  • 76% of consumers are likely to abandon a transaction if their preferred payment method is not accepted.
  • Despite growing demand for digital wallets, respondents shared that only 58% of providers accept them.

AI, Mobile, and Social Media on the Rise

Mobile devices and social media are being used more often for online shopping, and AI is also now part of the holiday shopping experience:

  • 72% of respondents preferred to use a smartphone or tablet vs. a laptop or desktop for online shopping, up from 68% last year.
  • 76% of respondents said social media sometimes or often influences their holiday shopping.
  • 37% of respondents used AI to help with their holiday shopping this past year, primarily for purchasing an item recommended on social media or a website, finding gifts via visual search, or getting gift recommendations from a chatbot. Specifically: 62.2% purchased a recommended item, 51.5% used AI for a visual search to help locate a gift and 51.2% asked an AI chatbot for gift recommendations based on a person's interests.

Omnichannel Options Grow

It is increasingly essential for brands to provide a seamless omnichannel experience:

  • 48% of respondents said they would leave a brand due to poor omnichannel shopping experiences.
  • 44% of consumers have encountered an issue with buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) options, with the main issue being the purchase was not ready to collect despite email confirmation that it was (23%).
  • The main omnichannel experience issue for this holiday season was curbside pickup. Again, users found that their purchases were not ready as confirmed — others simply couldn't find the option on the app or website, among other challenges.

Bugs Persist With Online Shopping

Bugs and issues are still a part of the online shopping experience for many:

The most common issues for online shopping were:

  • Website crashes (43%)
  • Errors with discount codes and coupons (34%)
  • Unable to find items on the website (28%)
  • Unable to add items to cart (21%)
  • Unable to complete payment transactions (19%)

The 2024 holiday shopping season showed us that consumers are less tolerant than ever when it comes to poor quality online shopping experiences. As brands continue to add omnichannel experiences and accept more payment options, they must account for increasingly complex customer journeys and test those journeys accordingly. Looking ahead, organizations need to prioritize a seamless customer experience, taking lessons learned from the challenges and issues that impacted the last holiday shopping season. 

Rob Mason is CTO of Applause

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Takeaways from the 2024 Holiday Shopping Season

Rob Mason
Applause

This past holiday season, my organization, Applause, conducted its fifth annual global survey on holiday shopping trends. With over 7,200 respondents from across the globe, the 2024 holiday shopping season revealed some interesting trends for consumers and retailers.

The Importance of Seamless Ecommerce Experiences

A reliable online shopping experience is becoming increasingly important to consumers, especially at checkout:

  • 26% of respondents said they would abandon an online purchase if they encountered a bug at any point during the experience.
  • 63% of respondents said they would abandon their shopping carts after a maximum of two purchase attempts, with 18% willing to try a third time.
  • Consumers are more likely to abandon a purchase at checkout (28%) than at any other part of the online shopping journey.

Evolving Payment Options

Consumers are continuing to diversify the way they make purchases, both in store and online — and if their preferred payment method isn't accepted, it's likely a dealbreaker:

  • 52% of respondents said they have started using a new payment method within the last year, such as a digital wallet, cryptocurrencies, and EFTs.
  • 76% of consumers are likely to abandon a transaction if their preferred payment method is not accepted.
  • Despite growing demand for digital wallets, respondents shared that only 58% of providers accept them.

AI, Mobile, and Social Media on the Rise

Mobile devices and social media are being used more often for online shopping, and AI is also now part of the holiday shopping experience:

  • 72% of respondents preferred to use a smartphone or tablet vs. a laptop or desktop for online shopping, up from 68% last year.
  • 76% of respondents said social media sometimes or often influences their holiday shopping.
  • 37% of respondents used AI to help with their holiday shopping this past year, primarily for purchasing an item recommended on social media or a website, finding gifts via visual search, or getting gift recommendations from a chatbot. Specifically: 62.2% purchased a recommended item, 51.5% used AI for a visual search to help locate a gift and 51.2% asked an AI chatbot for gift recommendations based on a person's interests.

Omnichannel Options Grow

It is increasingly essential for brands to provide a seamless omnichannel experience:

  • 48% of respondents said they would leave a brand due to poor omnichannel shopping experiences.
  • 44% of consumers have encountered an issue with buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) options, with the main issue being the purchase was not ready to collect despite email confirmation that it was (23%).
  • The main omnichannel experience issue for this holiday season was curbside pickup. Again, users found that their purchases were not ready as confirmed — others simply couldn't find the option on the app or website, among other challenges.

Bugs Persist With Online Shopping

Bugs and issues are still a part of the online shopping experience for many:

The most common issues for online shopping were:

  • Website crashes (43%)
  • Errors with discount codes and coupons (34%)
  • Unable to find items on the website (28%)
  • Unable to add items to cart (21%)
  • Unable to complete payment transactions (19%)

The 2024 holiday shopping season showed us that consumers are less tolerant than ever when it comes to poor quality online shopping experiences. As brands continue to add omnichannel experiences and accept more payment options, they must account for increasingly complex customer journeys and test those journeys accordingly. Looking ahead, organizations need to prioritize a seamless customer experience, taking lessons learned from the challenges and issues that impacted the last holiday shopping season. 

Rob Mason is CTO of Applause

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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