We're on Google+
Search
Tag Cloud
Accessories Amazon Asda Christmas Department Store Fashion High Street John Lewis London Marks & Spencer Media News Retail Retail news Sainsbury's Store Tesco UK apple brand burberry chain china clothes consumer deal deals and rumours e-commerce ecommerce electricals expansion facebook fashion news food grocer group jewellery launch luxury morrisons my online online retail profit property retailer sale sales supermarket waitrose
John Lewis “surprised” by surge in m-commerce sales Wednesday, 28th December 2011
It seems the days of braving the snow for the Boxing Day sales may be drawing to a close as consumers increasingly favour mobile shopping to bricks and mortar stores.
Mobile traffic to the John Lewis online clearance sale soared 119 per cent on last year’s levels, with the amount of cash spent online from mobile phones up 46 per cent since the sale began at 5pm on Christmas Eve.
"Mobile has reached a scale now where all retailers have to take it seriously," said Jonathon Brown, head of online selling for John Lewis. "Customers' behaviours have changed. The transaction volume we've had in the last few days has surprised all of us."
As shoppers snapped up big-ticket discounted items – with laptops, flat screen televisions, Dyson vacuum cleaners and bed linen among the best sellers – there were 356,000 mobile visitors to the John Lewis site from the start of the sale to Boxing Day, out of a total 2.9 million digital visits.
Anticipating the switch from laptop screen to smartphone when spending, John Lewis this week introduced virtual shop windows at its stores in cities including London, Liverpool and Edinburgh. Customers passing by can use an iPhone to scan the barcodes of items displayed, which calls up a link to the relevant page on the mobile website so that the purchase can be made without setting foot in the store.
"Mobile shopping is dramatically more significant this year than it ever has been before," said Richard Dodd, British Retail Consortium (BRC) head of media. "People are now carrying round access to a whole world of price and product information they couldn't have before and that means retail is an even more competitive business."
Related Stories
Posted in Department Stores, M-Commerce Tagged john lewis, m-commerce, sales, department, store, retail
