This month in the world of app commerce – October

🕙 The final countdown to Black Friday and Cyber Week has begun. With less than a month to go, we take a look at the latest findings and predictions for peak trading to come.

🚀 Expect the growth of omnichannel and mobile this holiday season

Shopping is becoming an increasingly mobile-first industry, with the first half of 2018 seeing the greatest number of shopping app downloads reported by Forbes and according to App Annie, when comparing 2016 to 2018, mobile sessions have risen 45%. This has been supported by research from Criteo, who found that 55% of British online shoppers are now choosing to do so through mobile.

This growth isn’t surprising considering mobile app users value convenience, but they’ll also be using their phones to make sure they get the best prices this holiday. According to PwC, smartphone’s share of overall shopping revenue (including online and in-store) is predicted to grow to 16%, up from 12% last holiday season.

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👍 Social commerce

Last month we spoke about how the rise of social commerce looks to impact on the way we shop and the growth of omnichannel. Earlier this month, Pinterest joined the long list of social media platforms announcing a move into social commerce, driving brand awareness and click-throughs to retailers online channels. With as many as 54% of millennials now using social media to research a product before making a purchase, social commerce looks to have a greater impact on peak trading this year.

🛒 Making the shopping experience easier

Continuing our look into the upcoming sales, it’s important to make the shopping journey as frictionless as possible in order to maximise on the inflated traffic. Ultimately retailers need to keep the checkout experience as simple as possible by minimising the number of steps needed and enabling cart saving, so shoppers who do abandon the checkout, can easily continue their order if they choose to return later. One great way this can be utilised is by retailers using app commerce, native app functionality in the form of push notifications will enable retailers to send reminders to customers of items waiting in their shopping cart. This drives shoppers back into the app, keeping the retailer at the forefront of the shopper’s mind and ultimately improves revenue and conversion.

4 top tips to make your app holiday ready

🎤 The voice of shopping

How will we be shopping on next year’s Black Friday? Celebrating Android’s 10th anniversary earlier this month, the technology giant that is Google announced the release of the Pixel 3 and the new Google Hub utilising their latest ventures into AI. But how does this impact the way we shop on mobile? Pioneers in the retail sector are literally embracing the call to action with voice shopping. ASOS has introduced voice shopping through Google Assistant on both phone and home devices, where shoppers can easily ask their Google Assistant enabled devices to talk to ASOS through a simple voice command. The potential to link this capability with mobile apps, so shoppers can make a request and see their results on a retailer’s app can only make product discovery and shopping more accessible and is something we’ll be watching closely here at Poq.

🚗 Mobile technologies driving how we shop

In other news, apps are also changing the way we shop in store, a string of UK supermarkets including Marks & Spencer and Tesco are embracing the model of cashierless checkout, a concept originally introduced by Amazon with their Amazon Go stores. These grocery retailers are now trialling a cashierless checkout experience through mobile apps in store with relative success.

We’ve often heard about augmented reality (AR) being used by retailers, especially in homeware, however, a new app utilises Apple’s latest AR and measurement release to help shoppers find the right size garments when shopping online. This feature, if proven to improve shoppers experiences and be accurate, could see retailers adopting the capabilities in their apps.

We’ll be closely watching the performance of app commerce throughout November and the hectic peak trading days. Stay tuned for more insights on app commerce throughout the sales on our blog, newsletter and on social.

Reported by Samantha Rigg