Five years ago, the idea of mobile commerce was seen as a separate category from both brick-and-mortar retail sales and e-commerce transactions conducted via desktop. With a new report Criteo now revealing that mobile app transactions jumped 64 percent globally in 2017, the very idea of mobile commerce as a separate walled garden from other retails sales is becoming increasingly anachronistic. Around the globe, consumers are engaging with retailers across multiple platforms and devices, both in and out of the physical store. The true opportunity for retailers, say the experts, is to combine data from these disparate sources to develop a full view of customer relationships.
By Rick Ferguson
Criteo’s Global Commerce Review for Q3 2017 is chock full of illuminating stats about the evolving nature of global commerce. The report analyzed more than 5,200 retail businesses globally and billions of annual transactions to determine the impact mobile commerce has on today’s shopper habits and preferences. As the report states, “Today’s shoppers are active on all browsing environments, they don’t stay in walled gardens, and they’re buying more on-the-go.” Key findings from the report:
- Apps account for 71 percent of sales for retailers who invest in both mobile web and shopping apps.
- 30 percent of desktop sales are preceded by a click on a mobile device
- In most world regions, mobile now accounts for more than 50% of online transactions, and in-app sales dominate.
Most critically, Criteo reports that “matched shoppers”—shoppers who interact with a retailer on more than one device—spend on average 14 percent more per order than non-matched shoppers. The report states that “Omnichannel retailers that can combine their offline and online data can apply over four times as much sales data to optimize their marketing efforts.” Money quote from Jonathan Opdyke, Chief Strategy Officer at Criteo, quoted in Retail TouchPoints:
“As [retailers] have tailored the apps more toward the use cases of what an app should do — using it to buy and using it in the store — they’ve made it more relevant for consumers… There’s a lot of blindness when people look at things in isolated ways. There’s no such thing as ‘mobile marketing’ anymore. Marketing is mobile. It’s a different world than it was five years ago. It took a change in consumer behavior, it took a change in screen size, it took a change in design, but the maturity in the U.S. is being hit.”
The challenge for retailers is not only to make those data connections, but to leverage the resulting data to drive personalization and the loyalty experience across all devices and touchpoints. Doing so will increasingly spell the difference between those retailers who thrive in the age of Amazon, and those who fall by the wayside. Criteo’s report provides some useful guideposts.
Rick Ferguson is Editor in Chief of the Wise Marketer Group and a Certified Loyalty Marketing Professional (CLMP).
