Flurry said “the retail industry is colliding with the mobile app economy”, following reports which suggest that mobile devices are responsible for an ever-growing share of e-commerce spending.
The company noted that from December 2011 to December 2012, the strongest growth was in time spent using the apps of retailers. This category saw an increase of 525 percent over the period, compared with 274 percent growth for shopping apps as a whole.
Indeed, retailer apps drove growth of the sector, performing significantly better than price comparison titles (247 percent), “purchase assistant” apps (228 percent) and online marketplaces (178 percent).
Underperforming – and growing more slowly than app use in general – were “daily deals” titles, which saw growth of 126 percent.
The growth in retailer apps means that this category has also usurped online marketplaces to account for the largest chunk of time spent using shopping apps, making up 27 percent of the total.
Online marketplaces follow, generating 20 percent of use, followed by purchase assistant apps at 17 percent.
The big loser was daily deals apps, which accounted for 13 percent of time spent using shopping apps, compared with 20 percent in December 2011.
Flurry said that “this suggests that retailers are beginning to better respond to the tectonic shift created by the collision of online- meeting offline-shopping through mobile apps”.
It continued: “To keep dollars flowing through their cash registers, retailers need to re-examine the consumer relationship from the ground up and through the lens of mobile-first.”
Comments