Mobile Shopping Is Retail’s Biggest Traffic Driver, According to a Salesforce Report

Digital commerce continues to grow, and in no platform have we seen bigger disruptions than mobile devices. From interacting with brands through social media to adding items to their carts, consumers are increasingly using their phones to place orders and make purchases instead of shopping the traditional retail format.

Salesforce‘s fourth-quarter shopping index proves just that, with mobile’s traffic and order shares hitting highs of 60 percent and 39 percent, respectively, while computer traffic and order shares continued to decline at 33 percent and 51 percent. Tablet traffic and order shares remained steady at 7 percent and 10 percent.

“Mobile is on the cusp of becoming not only biggest traffic driver to retail sites, but also the biggest avenue for placing orders,” said Caila Schwartz, senior industry strategist at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. “The growth values are even more staggering – all of the growth in traffic and orders came from mobile.”

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According to the report, the majority of 2017 demonstrated growing shopper spending and flat traffic growth in digital commerce. However, the tables were turned come the last quarter, with the Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping period driving traffic growth above shopper spending growth.

Although computers and tablets were either unchanged or saw a decline in growth during the holiday season, mobile rose to 43 percent from 29 percent in orders and 25 percent from 12 percent in traffic. “The message could not be more clear: Retailers’ roadmaps should begin and end with optimizing everything – everything – for mobile,” Schwartz added.

The CRM company also recorded that shoppers showed the highest levels of buying intent on record, with 18 percent of traffic indicating a buying signal such as a product search, adding to a cart or checking out during their online visits. The share of these visits that eventually led to a purchase increased by 10 percent across all devices.

For the shopping index, Salesforce gathered data from 796 digital commerce sites throughout 38 countries that are frequented by 500 million shoppers who make up 1.6 billion visits.

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