Holiday Shopping by Phone

The 2015 holiday shopping has just begun, yet we’re already getting some feedback on how consumers are buying.

On Thanksgiving, shoppers chose to use their Smartphones and tablets. According to a new poll from Branding Brand, mobile shoppers made up 63% of total online visits to retail sites.

This in turn prompted retailers to extend their traditional Black Friday sales. (Perhaps you noticed that Black Friday now begins on Wednesday, and lasts all weekend, at many online retail sites.)

These days, people don’t even need to get up from the holiday dinner table to shop.

And unlike recent years, they’re not just shopping on their phones, they’re buying. Branding Brand found that mobile sites saw a 25% increase in conversion from 2014.

Maybe this is a good thing. While it may be obnoxious to phone-shop at a holiday gathering, it’s far less rude than leaving a gathering early to get in on some “doorbuster” event at a store.

Just make sure you’re not driving-while-shopping this year. Convenience is a good thing, but holiday multi-tasking can be taken too far.