Categories: Ecommerce

Will India’s first Great Online Shopping festival be festive?

Google is about to push ecommerce to a next level in India tomorrow (12-12-12). When it comes to valuations I think Indian ecommerce sites have done a great job in pushing the envelope. Now everyone wants to see some real stuff. It is good to see Google taking this initiative and one has to thank all the participants (who all must be under pressure for increasing transactions which were promised in their business plans). Read more about GOSF here.

The recently concluded Black Friday & Cyber Monday was a huge success in the US. It would be nice to have a detailed report of GOSF with some real numbers. GOSF (Great Online Shopping Festival) will not be anywhere near Black Friday & Cyber Monday, at least for now.

The recently concluded Black Friday & Cyber Monday (Monday after Thanksgiving) had some interesting findings.

  • Online sales jumped 26 percent on Black Friday to $1.04 billion from sales of $816 million on the corresponding day last year.
  • Items per order: 5.56 (2012), 6.37 (2011) – down 12.72%
  • Conversions are way up on online stores at 4.58%. That’s visitors who actually checkout and buy something. Up 9% from last year.
  • Cyber Monday spending hit $1.5 billion in the U.S. to make it the biggest shopping day in history
  • Cyber Monday spending was up 17 percent year over year, and that overall, e-commerce spending for the first 26 days of the holiday season has totaled $16.4 billion, a 16 percent increase over last year.
  • For the holiday season for the first 37 days of Nov-December $26.6 billion has been spent online, marking a 13-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.

Role of Mobile Devices on Black Friday

  • Android has 52.5 percent of smartphone subscribers while iOS has 34.3 percent (source comscore).
  • 55% of mobile devices in the US are smartphones but account for less than 25% of overall traffic.
  • Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) accounted for 16% of sales. That’s up from 10% last year.
  • Mobile devices accounted for 24% of site traffic. Up from 14% last year.
  • 77% of mobile traffic on Black Friday came from iOS devices.
  • iPhones accounted for 9% of site traffic, up from 5% last year.
  • The iPad generated more traffic than any other tablet or smart phone, reaching nearly 10 percent of online shopping.
  • Android phones and tablets accounted for 5.5% of site traffic, up from 4% last year.
  • Clearly iOS users believe in ecommerce more than Android users.

Social Ecommerce Failure

  • 40% increase in social-media campaigns by its clients for the Black Friday shopping weekend compared with last year.
  • Shoppers referred from Social Networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube generated 0.34 percent of all online sales on Black
    Friday, a decrease of more than 35 percent from 2011.
  • Only 0.68% of Black Friday online sales came from Facebook referrals–two-thirds of one percent. That was a decline of 1% from last year.
  • Twitter’s impact on ecommerce was zero.
  • Commerce site traffic from Twitter accounted for exactly 0.00% of Black Friday traffic. That was down from 0.02% last year.

References,

BG Mahesh

Internet application ideator and implementor. Been there and done that since early 1990s. I like to present data to the common man in the simplest manner on the internet.

Recent Posts

From Entropy to Negentropy: The Transformative Power of Open Finance- Part I

We live in a world awash with digital transformation, and yet filled with painful and…

4 weeks ago

Brand recall of the WiFi logo in India is very strong

It is a well-known fact that branding plays a significant role in the success of…

8 months ago

Fixing the Visa application process with Consent Managers

Lately I have been coming across the frustrations faced in the visa application process. Earlier,…

11 months ago

How India can solve the Challenges in Digital Advertising starting in 2023

India has the second-largest online population. The rapid Internet access and mobile proliferation is the…

1 year ago

Digital Media needs an Online Dispute Resolution system

The digital media landscape has changed tremendously over the last decade. Social media has amplified…

2 years ago

Digital Ad spend in India to grow 28% in 2021

It is not surprising to see advertising will grow in the year 2021. It does…

3 years ago