As the retail industry moves toward pandemic recovery, time spent in mobile shopping apps is up 30% YoY
What’s Happening:
Amazon Prime Day has officially announced Prime Day for June 21 and 22, 2021, and consumers are already gearing up for Amazon’s biggest shopping day of the year. Digital commerce has increased immensely over the past year and is on track to surpass $11 trillion in sales in 2021 — Amazon alone added 50 million Prime subscribers during the pandemic due to the closure of brick and mortar stores. We are seeing elevated levels of mobile shopping heading into this year’s Prime Day as pandemic habits hold strong and predict that Amazon’s Prime Day will outperform its pre-pandemic numbers. Globally, outside of China, time spent in shopping apps during the 4 weeks ending May 22 was up 30% compared to the same period last year.
Why It Matters:
Last year, Amazon’s Prime Day event was held in October 2020, having been postponed from the summer due to the pandemic. The two-day sales event has traditionally been a huge driver of traffic to the Amazon app, surpassing sales on the platform on Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. The sales holiday has steadily drawn increased users and downloads of the Amazon app in the leadup to Prime Day, since it was introduced in 2015. We expect the week of Prime Day 2021 to draw in 1 billion hours on Android phones worldwide, outside of China, up 25% year over year from the week of Prime Day 2020.
Other major retailers have traditionally hosted their own online sales events to coincide with Amazon’s Prime Day. Last year, Walmart ran its “Big Save” event and Target hosted its “Deal Days” sales to run concurrently with Prime Day. Other players ranking among the top Shopping apps also saw bumps in US downloads during the week of Prime Day 2020 amidst heightened consumer demand and timely promotions. After Amazon, SHEIN ranked #4 by US downloads during the week of Prime Day 2020 and saw 20% week-over-week growth. Nike and Target ranked #7 and #10 during the same period and saw 75% and 20% growth week over week. There is anticipation that Walmart, Target, BestBuy and others may adopt similar strategies to past years. As of April 2021, Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Wish were the top Shopping apps by time spent on Android phones in the US.
Go Deeper:
Retailers have heavily relied on mobile commerce over the past year to make up for the decrease in in-person purchases. Even as the pandemic restrictions are lifted and stores open to in-person shopping, we predict that mobile commerce will continue to rise and present a key element for retailers to capitalize on. We expect more retailers will follow in the steps of mobile-savvy retailers like Zara to prioritize fully integrated in-store and online shopping experiences.
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