It’s a bad time for those who love consistency to get into eCommerce. While a few short years ago desktop-based searches and purchases looked to be the future of a new age of retail, emerging data is proving that that time has already come and gone.
According to research conducted by SimilarWeb and obtained by eMarketer, mobile commerce has become a veritable global force for digital sales. In the U.K. alone, mobile-based traffic constituted 65 percent of all eCommerce searches and purchases. Merry Old England is far from the only country experiencing a predominant amount of Web traffic emanating from consumers’ mobile devices, though; in the U.S., 54 percent of traffic comes from smartphones and tablets, while India sees 52 percent.
In fact, it’s not until countries like France, Brazil and Russia where mobile traffic rates dip below 40 percent.
But if mobile commerce is the new king of eCommerce traffic, the kingdom is seeing desktop put together something of a rebellion through page views and visit length. In the U.K., SimilarWeb found that desktop searches averaged 13.6 page views per visit, while mobile could muster only around 7.6. The data followed the trend in other countries, too: In the U.S., desktop outperformed mobile 9.1 to 5.6; in Germany, it was even more of a landslide with 16.8 desktop page views compared to mobile’s paltry 8.6.
The metrics on time spent on retailers’ sites weighed heavily in favor of the desktop. U.K. consumers spent seven minutes and 30 seconds per visit, while they could only stomach five minutes and 14 seconds on the smaller screens of their mobile devices. U.S. shoppers showed similar tolerances on desktop, but the vaunted American attention span struck on mobile and led customers away after just four minutes and 28 seconds on mobile.
If retailers were looking for a direction to focus their eCommerce efforts, they found none here.
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