The E-Commerce competition between Desktop and Mobile

History has shown us that the shifting of trends inside the commercial ecosystem is quite inevitable. It isn’t too long since the online shopping (e-commerce) has disrupted the window or traditional shopping system. Now, customers has the access to infinite choices with bare minimum efforts. They just need to open their electronic devices, log in to an online shop and order the goods while resting on their comfortable places.

Talking about the online shopping platforms, a lot of sellers and vendors are running the e-commerce market today. But when we think of leading e-commerce giants, ‘Amazon’ strikes the mind. It’s interesting to see how Amazon has positioned itself in the industry over the years. Keeping the ‘Customer Satisfaction’ as the priority, it is being successful to position itself as the most convenient company with the lowest prices and the best customer service out there.

Now, the current shift of trend we are observing is the migration of the e-commerce customers from desktop (browser) shopping to mobile (cellphone) shopping. To portray the same, we at m19, decided to run an analysis on the ongoing shift in Amazon.

So here is what we did, we selected some maximum selling accounts of our clients for four countries (namely USA, UK, France, and Germany) and on the global level. Then, we calculated the ratio of sessions for their ASINs from desktop and the mobile (both country wise and globally) from the buyers for one months of two years, i.e., 2021 & 2022. And the result we obtained just served the purpose of adding one more evidence to the stake.

Below, you can find the graphs depicting ratios of sessions for respective countries and in global scale for year 2021 -

So apparently, the customers preferred desktop in USA and France, one of the reasons can be the clarity they get while browsing through desktop. Mobile was the preferred device in UK and Germany. Talking at the global level, customers preferred desktop over mobile for online shopping.Now, let’s have a look how it evolved over the year. You can find below the graphs for the same matrices for year 2022 –

So surprisingly (or not), the sessions using the mobile have surpassed the sessions using the desktop within the six months of current year. The proposed reasons for the same could be the easiness and convenience while using the mobile for online shopping.

Although it explicitly explains that the mobiles are leading in the number of sessions this year, the respective conversion rates for these two electronic devices still stands in between to conclude the competition.

According to the famous literature reviews (The Future of Retail Is Mobile by Gian M. Fulgoni, Andrew Lipsman, Mobile vs desktop user search behaviours of the 1300K site, a Korean shopping search engine by ****Soyeon Park, Kihun Cho), the desktop still tanks the conversion rate in comparison to the mobiles, because it is comparatively easier to make transactions using the desktop. But, it will really be interesting to watch how the trend changes in the near future with the continuous bombardment of disruptive payment technologies for mobiles.

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Saurabh Chaturvedi