Mobile Payments Anticipates Record-Breaking Cyber Monday

We all knew already that mobile was going to be a big part of the Thanksgiving weekend shopping rush, and with good reason. The convenience of pulling out a mobile device and starting to shop from just about anywhere—even at the dinner table between bites of turkey—is hard to resist for a lot of people. New word from Adobe Analytics, meanwhile, shows that the Cyber Monday event is on track to be a record-breaker, showing us further that shopping online, from a mobile or otherwise, is still very much in play.

The word from Adobe Analytics says that this Cyber Monday, once it’s all said and done—though the counts might be skewed a bit given how many “Cyber Monday Week” sales there are out there—will come in with around $7.9 billion in online sales. That represents nearly 20 percent—19.7 percent, actually—above 2017’s final count of $6.6 billion.

Immediately, one point becomes clear: Cyber Monday accounted for more sales in raw numbers than Black Friday’s online figures could generate. Black Friday saw $6.2 billion in online sales. With the start of the holiday shopping season shifting back to November 1 rather than waiting an additional three weeks, we’ve already seen some gains overall, and a flattening of the curve thanks to the expanded time frame. Online spending for the month of November has hit $58.5 billion, though it’s not clear just how much of that is related to holiday-related shopping.

Mobile was a huge part of this as well, accounting for about 42.6 percent of sales, around $2 billion. Smartphones also made up a majority of traffic sources in hitting retail sites, accounting for 58.9 percent of said visits. Throw in an extra 6.4 percent from tablets and it becomes clear how important mobile is to the overall shopping phenomenon.

With so many reports coming in about how people are using mobile devices to shop, it’s a great opportunity for mobile payments to really step up and seize some market share. We know what the big problems are: mobile payments aren’t safe enough, aren’t convenient enough, and aren’t delivering a truly compelling reason to use them beyond the sheer gee-whiz factor of pulling out your phone and paying for a purchase.

Improvements to safety, usability and reward; these are the three key paths that mobile payments should be taking on to drive future use. Getting these three down should go a long way toward sparking further use down the line.