UK Shoppers Take Out the Mobiles for Holiday Shopping

It’s Christmas, all over again—just like the Tom Petty song noted—and people are starting to take a good hard look at store sales and the contents of their wallets to spread some Christmas cheer and get some people some nice stuff. As it turns out, according to a new study from Marler Haley, in the UK, shoppers will be turning heavily to mobile devices to search out retail goods.

The study actually suggests that retail searches will reach 60 percent during the Black Friday / Christmas shopping season corridor, which should prove as a wake-up call to businesses who haven’t modified their operations to accommodate mobile in its various forms. Given that even Google is looking to a mobile first index, that’s not a bad idea.

Christmas sales are a major push for mobile, and we’ve seen this development taking place over the last several years. Just in 2016, annual search volume relating to sales was up 77 percent over 2015’s figures, and there’s little to figure that similar gains won’t be seen this year over that. What’s more, shopping for sale terms in December explodes in terms of use; the s

Though admittedly, Black Friday is a comparatively new phenomenon in the UK, it’s still being taken to in rapid fashion, complete with steady, massive growth in search traffic. In November alone, the UK sees over seven million searches for “Black Friday” and related terms. Given that the Black Friday-related spending on online retail sites reached a whopping 1.23 billion pounds sterling—about $1.624 billion US as of this writing—that’s a lot of potential sales at stake for companies, and reason enough to embrace mobile.

Mobile payments, mobile searches, mobile order-ahead…the retail world is going increasingly mobile these days and the numbers keep bearing it out. An increasingly large part of life is being experienced through the mobile platform, and we’re likely to not see that slow. Retailers: it’s time to get fully prepared for a mobile world. Failing to do so now not only keeps you out of the running for a major chunk of market, but it may potentially take the whole business down with it.