According to Adobe, the average retail site got 26.6% of its US visits from smartphones in 2014, and 17.8% from tablets, leaving more than half coming from the desktop. The desktop still accounts for a majority of sales?72% of the total in Q1 2015, according to Branding Brand?but visits from mobile are continuing to rise.
Data from Monetate put the mobile share a bit lower for 2014, but still showed a clear trend of increasing traffic from smartphones and tablets throughout the year in the US, with desktop’s share of the total dropping from 71.6% in Q1 to 65.2% by Q4.
In Great Britain, according to Monetate, the trend is more advanced: Desktop-based traffic to retail sites dropped from 52.0% in Q1 2014 to 47.4% by Q4, with nearly 31% of traffic coming from tablets and 25.0% coming from smartphones during the final quarter of the year. The worldwide average, Monetate reported, is closer to the situation in the US, with 64.6% of traffic coming from desktops in Q4.
As recently as 2011, according to Custora, nine in 10 visitors to US ecommerce sites were coming from desktop or laptop PCs, and the share from tablets was nonexistent.
Branding Brand reported that in Q1 2015, search was the biggest driver of smartphone traffic to retailers, with 43% of all smartphone visits in the US coming directly from search. Around a quarter of smartphone visits were direct, and 16% were triggered by emails.
Branding Brand also reported that iPhones accounted for 58% of all smartphone traffic, while iPads made up 69% of visits from tablets.
