Online shopping is increasingly mobile. Especially those of clothing

Already, nearly two-thirds of visits to online stores are entries from smartphones and tablets, according to data collected by the Shoper platform. This proportion reverses in favor of computers when shoppers want to go "to checkout." However, the share of mobile shopping is steadily growing, especially in apparel stores.

The days when the Internet was "in the computer" are now prehistory. It won't be long before half of all home appliances will themselves connect to the network. Despite this, we still think that gadgets are used for entertainment, and that a large screen and keyboard are necessary for more serious tasks. We perceive e-commerce as the domain of computers, meanwhile data from several thousand stores on the Shoper platform shows that the favorite device for browsing their offerings is a smartphone. In January and February 2019, phones were responsible for 60 percent of visits to e-stores, 37 percent of entries were recorded from computers and the remaining 3 percent from tablets.

Compared to the same period of 2018, the share of smartphones increased by as much as 10 percent, mainly at the expense of computers. However, it is worth bearing in mind that these statistics apply to all visits to the Shoper platform, not all of which end in a purchase.

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Watching on phone, shopping on computer

Shoper also carefully analyzed those e-commerce visits that led to sales in January and February 2019. In 58 percent of cases, users used a computer, 39 percent used a smartphone and 3 percent used a tablet.

- The data collected shows that there is a sizable portion of shoppers who choose their phone to browse the store's offerings, and when it comes to buying, they switch to the computer. No wonder, we always have our cell phone with us, and it takes several seconds to enter the store's website. When it comes to entering the delivery address and completing the payment, the big screen still seems more convenient, notes Jacek Zientkiewicz, Brand Manager of Shopera.

A good complement to these figures is this year's SMSAPI report on consumer and brand communications. Of the 1,000 respondents, 59 percent said they preferred to read a message with a promotional offer on their phone rather than on a computer. Subsequent questions asked about further stages of contact with the e-store, and gradually users' sympathies shifted toward the computer - 71 percent said they preferred to finalize the purchase on the computer.

- Until a few years ago, online services were designed primarily with computers in mind. Mobile versions of stores or services were added later. Everyone probably has in his memory a contact with a non-responsive site, where he had to get through a complicated form on a small phone screen. Today such situations hardly happen, so the reserve against mobile devices will probably soon disappear. We note that links in promotional SMS are gaining popularity. Companies are already creating their stores in RWD technology as a standard, so users already know that this way they will go straight to the responsive store page, says Andrzej Ogonowski of SMSAPI.

Why do we buy clothes on mobile?

The industry where mobile devices have most dominated online shopping is apparel. In January and February 2019. 58 percent of orders at stores selling clothing were completed using smartphones. On the other hand, in the compilation of all visits, including those when users didn't buy anything, the share of small-screen gadgets was 71 percent.

- Some of the mobile shopping probably comes straight from fitting rooms in traditional stores. After checking to see if a new garment fits well, customers pull out their phone and make sure they can't find the same item cheaper online. When they succeed, they are only a few taps away from making a purchase. But naturally, that's not the only reason. Clothes are relatively inexpensive, so we like to buy them quickly and impulsively, and using a smartphone is very conducive to this. Research from the UK also found a correlation between mobile shopping and frequent use of social media. Fashion brands and stores are very active on these sites, attacking users with promotional messages," explains Jacek Zientkiewicz.

To meet the growing popularity of shopping on mobile devices, Shoper introduced PWA (Progressive Web Apps) functionality in all its stores in late 2018. People who open a store page that uses this functionality can easily save a shortcut to it as an icon on their smartphone or tablet desktop. From then on, they conveniently enter the store they are interested in as if it were a mobile app, and are even more likely to go through the full shopping process on the small screen.