Mobile sales are growing, but sales come via desk
Mobile sales opportunities in e-commerce are advancing. As Adobe shows in its latest study, "ADI Mobile Retail Report 2016," the biggest growth drivers are smartphones, well ahead of tablets and desktop PCs. Despite the enormous growth rate in smartphone sales, however, the desktop PC remains the cash cow of e-commerce.
74 percent of visits are still gained by European retailers via the desktop. The smartphone continues to catch up, but remains behind the desktop.
For the "Adobe Mobile Retail Report," consumer data was examined on the basis of over 300 billion visits to more than 16,000 and over 90 billion app launches. No figures were collected for Switzerland, but similar trends are likely to emerge as in the European e-commerce market as a whole.
Sales generated via smartphones increased significantly in Europe last year, even doubling in France (+103 percent) and the UK (+99 percent). In Germany, too, the trend is clearly toward mobile shopping (+90 percent). Smartphones are thus clearly ahead of desktop PCs and tablets as growth drivers in the retail sector.
Despite the enormous growth rate in smartphone sales, however, the desktop PC remains the cash cow of e-commerce: German retailers, for example, booked 79 percent of their annual sales via the desktop channel and only 9 percent were generated via the smartphone. This is the result of the current "ADI Mobile Retail Report 2016" from Adobe.
Desktop (still) preferred
The current ADI report shows a similar picture for online retail traffic: the smartphone is also a convincing traffic driver in terms of visits to retailer websites, with immense growth averaging 54 percent in Europe (UK: 42 percent, Germany: +80 percent, France: +88 percent). The importance of desktop PCs, on the other hand, is declining somewhat year-on-year (-6 percent). Overall, sales via the desktop "keep their nose in front":
74 percent of visits are still gained by European retailers via the desktop. The smartphone continues to catch up, but remains behind the desktop.
"The impressive growth figures in the current ADI Mobile Retail Report 2016 make one thing clear above all: there is no way around mobile in future e-commerce. However, it is also clear that there is still a huge gap in performance between desktop and smartphone. Across Europe, the conversion rate for desktop is 2.6 times higher than for smartphone," says Andreas Helios, Senior Group Manager Digital Marketing Solutions at Adobe Systems.
Retailers urgently need to catch up here. It is no longer necessary to transfer desktop business one-to-one to the smartphone, but to meet the specific mobile requirements in terms of a successful customer experience. Only in this way can customers complete their purchase directly on their smartphone and not be left somewhere along the way on their customer journey, says the Senior Group Manager Digital Marketing Solutions at Adobe Systems.
