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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

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...