Klarna: Mobile Devices Playing a Bigger Part in Christmas Shopping

The Christmas shopping season has begun in earnest, and there will be plenty of shoppers for Kwanzaa and Hanukkah as well.

Regardless of the holiday of choice, however, it’s likely to be a big holiday for mobile shoppers, and a recent report from Klarna spells out just how big this holiday’s proving to be so far alone.

The Klarna study—dubbed the Klarna U.S. Consumer Survey: 2014 Holiday Shopping—made it clear that mobile shopping represents some big stakes. It led off with a bombshell: more users turned to mobile devices than to any other platform for Cyber Monday shopping.

Forty-seven percent of users led off with a mobile device, whether smartphone or tablet, and 40 percent turned to a laptop. Desktops made up 28 percent of the mass and one percent turned to an unclassified device for shopping.

This should be great news for mobile sites and the like, but a complication held things up.

Better than two thirds of that 47 percent who used a mobile device actually abandoned a purchase somewhere in the pipeline. Sixty-nine percent ditched a mobile cart, and that’s a lot of money that got left on the table.

A variety of reasons were cited for cart abandonment, but one of the biggest was related to the checkout process. Whether it took too long, demanded information that wasn’t readily available, was tough to work with, or didn’t seem safe, the checkout process proved an impediment to a great deal of shoppers.

Also making appearances in the “why I abandoned my cart” listings were technical issues, a lack of good deals, or just simple mind-changing.

Cyber Monday wasn’t the only day shoppers would turn to mobile, either; 72 percent of consumers responding said that a mobile device would be in play for holiday shopping, but not necessarily for purchases.

Some would use said devices for price comparisons or to find deals, or even to find particular items. This is a disturbing notion for mobile, as the report noted that 88 percent of consumers were planning to do at least some shopping online this holiday season.

Naturally, the Millennial generation proved most open to mobile shopping, with almost half—45 percent—planning to do all their holiday shopping online, and 89 percent of those aged 18-24 turning to mobile to shop. Eighty percent of 25 – 34 year olds, meanwhile, planned to do likewise.

Here is a perfect course of action encapsulated into one handy package for retailers: shore up the checkout process, immediately, if not sooner.

By doing that one thing, a good chunk of the problems that users encounter is removed from consideration outright. Making the checkout process smoother, easier to work with, less demanding of information and more secure will go a long way toward getting interested users ready to go.

In fact, nearly three times as many users abandoned a cart because they decided not to make a purchase at all, rather than switch to a desktop or laptop instead. But by getting a better handle on the checkout process, users get a better overall customer experience, and that in turn makes for customers more likely to return.

There’s no way to remove all of the abandoned carts, of course. There will always be those who change their minds midstream, or someone who has a technical error crop up. Fixing all of that is just impossible. But when a large parcel of the problem can be fixed by addressing just one sector of operations—here, the checkout process—not putting the effort in to fixing said problem just doesn’t make sense.