Study: Emerging commerce channel comes of age

A digital consumer touch-point long thought to offer little in the way of “hard” ROI appears to be changing that trend.



According to a study of aggregated, anonymized U.S. traffic and revenue data from Kibo (the new company created from the merger of MarketLive, Shopatron and Fiverun), there was a 138% increase in total social revenue during 2015 compared to 2014.



The social channel generated even more value for retailers when consumers used a smartphone as their means of access. Compared to the prior year, social revenue originating from smartphones grew 247%, while smartphone-based social traffic rose 236%. During the fourth quarter holiday season, revenue attributed to social traffic coming from smartphones rose 479%.



Facebook demonstrated its dominance as a consumer social platform, accounting for 54% of all social traffic and 71% of all social revenue.



More expectedly, mobile also demonstrated its continued growing strength as a commerce channel. Traffic from smartphone users rose 43% for the year and 54% during the fourth quarter holiday season. Smartphone revenue increased 92% for the year and 75% for the fourth quarter holiday period.



The average online order value in all categories during 2015 was $163.87. Overall online traffic in 2015 rose 13.5%. However, beauty and health retailers saw online traffic grow 47%, compared to the prior year, more than triple the overall average.



“Considering the pervasiveness of smartphones and mobile devices in our everyday lives, these mobile and social trends are right on target with how we, as consumers, prefer to shop,” said Kenneth Frank, CEO, Kibo. “The key for retailers is to ensure that they have the technology in place to keep up with shoppers’ digital demands.”