Maybe they should rename it Mobile Monday.
From Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday (aka yesterday, Nov. 30), nearly half of Walmart’s online orders were placed through mobile devices—doubling the retailer’s mobile transactions from the same period a year earlier.
The shift away from desktop orders means mobile has “firmly established itself as the dominant shopping trend, for both traffic and sales,” said Fernando Madeira, president and CEO of Walmart.com.
“Our customers went from previously mostly searching and browsing on mobile, to making purchases at a much higher rate.”
Mobile now makes up more than 70% of Walmart’s online traffic, the company said. And while its app is the fastest-growing and most popular in bricks-and-mortar retail, it’s hardly the only big-box chain seeing a migration to mobile orders.
According to Adobe Digital Index, mobile accounted for nearly half of online traffic and 28%, or $514 million, of online sales on Cyber Monday, based on data for 125 million visits to 4,500 retail websites. The boost in mobile shopping also helped make this the biggest Thanksgiving weekend ever for e-commerce, with $11 billion in online sales from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday, a 15% increase from last year.
The lift in e-commerce may have hurt store traffic, analytics firm RetailNext found. RetailNext, which collects in-store data from more than 200 partner brands and retailers, reported that sales at US bricks-and-mortar retailers fell 4.7% on a 5.1% decline in store traffic during the holiday weekend.
Walmart did not reveal specific revenue figures for Thanksgiving weekend. Last year, the retailer drove up fourth-quarter US same-store sales by 1.5% with the help of the nearly 1 billion transactions completely during the six-week holiday season, which included Walmart’s biggest online shopping day ever—Cyber Monday.