Mobile Thursday, Black Friday, Cyber Monday -- any day of the week -- consumers are buying goods and services on a mobile device. Merchants who were smart enough to merchandise for the small screen and optimize checkout enjoyed record-breaking results from mobile this holiday season.
Ok, so let’s talk real numbers. At Braintree, we have more than 3,000 merchants on our platform, many who are leaders in optimizing for mobile, and over $1.5 billion in annual mobile volume and growing. This gives us a really nice bird’s-eye view into mobile purchase behavior. On Cyber Monday, we saw 29% of sales on our platform coming from a mobile device. This is up 50% compared to Cyber Monday 2011 and almost twice the 16% mobile figure that IBM reported. Not very surprising to us -- our mobile merchants lead the pack when it comes to optimizing around a frictionless mobile purchase experience.
Here’s a better glimpse of the explosion happening for companies taking a mobile-first approach. Fab.com, one of Braintree’s merchants, had an average basket size on mobile that was higher than their online basket size. 35% of Fab’s dollar volume and 30% of all transactions for the weekend came from mobile. They continue to invest big in mobile - so it’s no wonder that Fab is planning to more than double their worldwide mobile sales in 12 months. And yes, tablets are turning shopping upside down, too. Marketing firm Monetate talks about 2012 being the first year that shopping conversion on tablets exceeded desktop.
Forbes has an interesting article on what happened this holiday season on mobile. These stats are becoming the new norm and this time next year we’ll be talking about mobile sales volumes overtaking traditional channels for the biggest names in retail. Guaranteed.