Digital Commerce Celebrated the Holiday with Mobile Momentum Carrying the Season

Demandware®, Inc. (NYSE: DWRE), the industry-leading provider of enterprise cloud commerce solutions, today released its 2015 All Wrapped Up Holiday Shopping Recap highlighting key trends and insights in digital commerce from the 2015 holiday shopping season. In 2015 digital continued to gain share on the physical store, mobile transformed the shopping arena and had a clear impact on sales, and free shipping shifted from seasonal offer to an absolute must.

Black Friday shined bright
The All Wrapped Up Holiday Shopping Recap confirms that Black Friday orders were up 53% from 2014 as shoppers placed six times the number of orders compared to a typical non-peak Friday. All told, orders were up 39% globally over the seven days of Cyber Week. Combined with the emergence of Black Friday as a big digital shopping day, shoppers proved that there is not simply one peak online day but an entire week of peak shopping.

Mobile momentum moved the needle
In 2015, phones shifted the shopping arena. Phone traffic was highest when it mattered most as share peaked at 49% on Cyber Saturday and 46% on Black Friday. In total, phones accounted for 24% of orders and 44% of traffic during the season.

Phone conversion made a difference
The number of carts created on phones doubled and basket rates on phones soared, up 25%. In fact, mobile accounted for 77% of cart growth in 2015. The spike in mobile orders was due, in part, to higher traffic levels, but conversion rates from phones also increased significantly this year. Cyber Monday mobile conversion was up 27%, peaking late in the evening at 10pm.

Shoppers expect free shipping
Shoppers continue to seek out and receive free shipping with 76% of all orders shipping for free, up from 74% during the 2014 season. On Cyber Monday, 88% of orders shipped for free, surpassing the 2014 rate of 83%. Free shipping is clearly no longer a perk but an expectation.

“The 2015 holiday shopping season was a unique and historic one. Black Friday shoppers relied on digital and phones proved to be the great enabler allowing busy consumers to shop and buy on the fly whenever or wherever they had a moment,” said Rick Kenney, Head of Consumer Insights at Demandware. “Retailers must stay attuned to changing shopper dynamics and provide consumers with a unified experience across all touch points in order to deliver a seamless and personalized shopping experience across devices.”

For key takeaways from the season download the full report 2015 All Wrapped Up Shopping Recap here.

About This Report
This report provides a snapshot of digital commerce metrics, focusing on the busy Christmas Holiday shopping season. Demandware sourced data for this report from digital commerce sites transacting on the Demandware Commerce Cloud that were live during this and last year’s holiday periods.

Time of day has been normalized to the shopper’s local time. Discount rate is calculated as the discount on merchandise purchased and does not include items already on markdown.

All Wrapped Up and these reported values are not indicative of Demandware’s operational performance or its reported financial metrics, including GMV growth and comparable GMV growth.

About Demandware
Demandware, the category-defining leader of enterprise cloud commerce solutions, empowers the world’s leading retailers to continuously innovate in our complex, consumer-driven world. The Demandware open cloud platform provides unique benefits including seamless innovation, the LINK ecosystem of integrated best-of-breed partners, and community insight to optimize customer experiences. These advantages enable Demandware customers to lead their markets and grow faster. For more information, visit http://www.demandware.com, call +1-888-553-9216 or email info@demandware.com.

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