Consumers are spending more time exploring retailers’ websites this holiday season, according to data from the ecommerce personalization platform Nosto.
Shoppers are taking longer this year to decide what they want to purchase, according to Nosto. The company analyzed more than 112 million website visits between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the period known as the Cyber 5. The visits were to 1,127 online stores that use Nosto’s platform, including merchants based in North America, the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, Latin America and the Asia Pacific region.
Nosto consumer insights from online holiday shopping
Online shoppers viewed 22% more pages on retailers’ websites per visit during the Cyber 5 in 2023 than they did in 2022, according to Nosto. They also spent 10% longer on each page, the data showed.
Compared with the same period in 2022, online shoppers were more than five times as likely this year to click on retailers’ on-site product recommendations. They were 81% more likely to click on personalized content that retailers showed on their ecommerce sites, and 13% more likely to click through product recommendations retailers sent via email marketing.
“Shoppers are definitely putting more time and effort into their holiday shopping, meaning that the retailers who make it easier for them to find the right products are reaping the benefits,” said Jan Soerensen, general manager for North America at Nosto.
Nosto attributes a 4.41% year-over-year increase in sales to the longer browsing time. Similarly, it also attributed a 4.1% increase in average order value for the online retailers to the increased time.
Understanding traffic growth by category, channel
Nosto found that traffic grew year over year among the health and beauty, fashion and accessories, and sporting goods and hobbies categories. Although the highest year-over-year traffic increase was among fashion and accessories brands that Nosto tracks (26.38% growth), the health and beauty category had the largest increases among the three when it came to both sales and average order value (AOV) increases.
Health and beauty online retailers that Nosto tracks increased sales 14.52% as AOV grew 11.21%. Fashion and accessories retailers using the platform increased sales 4.56% as AOV rose 4.27% year over year. Sporting goods and hobbies retailers increased traffic 23.03%, lifting sales 12.85% year over year as AOV grew 7.84%
All the while, mobile commerce accounted for nearly three-quarters of all traffic (74%) to online retailers using the Nosto platform during the Cyber 5. Mobile ecommerce sales represented 62% of total sales among online retailers Nosto tracks.
“However, consumers are still using desktops for their highest-value purchases, with this channel seeing an AOV of $141.59 (USD) compared with $109.01 on mobile,” Nosto said in a press release.
This mobile-majority share of ecommerce sales during the Cyber 5 falls in line with data from Adobe Analytics. Adobe found that Thanksgiving “set a new bar” for mobile shopping. 59% of Thanksgiving online sales came from a smartphone, compared with 55% in 2022, according to Adobe. And mobile shopping carried on strong through the Cyber 5, with 51.8% of online sales coming from smartphones. That’s up from 49.9% during the 2022 Cyber 5 period.
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