Fashion shoppers turn to mobile: report

An early analysis of fashion shopping habits globally this holiday season shows mobile phones account for 67 per cent of traffic to fashion retail sites and 52 per cent of sales revenue. Conversion rates on phones have risen by 53 per cent since last year, suggesting a large impact from both consumers growing more accustomed to buying fashion on their smartphones and retailers better utilising personalisation technologies.

The data comes from Nosto the AI-powered eCommerce personalisation platform, whose customers include including Gymshark, Aquascutum, Everlast, Helly Hansen and Volcom.

It analysed almost 27m visits to 308 online fashion stores who use the Nosto online retail personalisation platform, including merchants in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, as shoppers hunted for bargains on the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend.

Many of the performance metrics suggest that consumers are showing a greater commitment to shopping for fashion on their phones; especially conversion rates which have jumped from 2.18 per cent in 2018 to 3.33 per cent this year. However, there remains work to do for online retailers.

The conversion rate on phones is still half that of desktop (3.33 per cent v 6.2 per cent), and holiday shoppers on their phones are spending nearly 9 per cent less per order on average than those on computers. At the same time, those who visit on their phones spend less time on site and are 10 per cent more likely to abandon their shopping cart than desktop visitors (76 per cent v 66 per cent).

“As they’re making shorter visits on a smaller screen, you’d expect mobile fashion shoppers to be harder to convince to make a purchase, and to be less likely to place larger orders, which we see in the data.” said Nosto CEO, Jim Lofgren. “But now that online fashion shopping is overwhelmingly mobile, being successful as a retailer comes down to having a truly mobile-first mentality – making it easy for shoppers to find their way around your site and quickly find just the products they want, and to check out with minimum effort.

Overall, across all devices, the data shows a 15 per cent increase in traffic to fashion retail sites over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping weekend year-on-year, together with a 78 per cent jump in online sales.