Many U.S. consumers spent this year’s Black Friday sales event shopping from home on mobile devices. This resulted in the first mobile shopping apps being installed in the US to break a new record for one-day installs on Black Friday 2020 to a report from the sensor tower. The company estimates US consumers downloaded around 2.8 million shopping apps as of November 27 – a number that is up nearly 8% year over year.
However, that number doesn’t necessarily represent faster growth than it did in 2019, which also saw the number of Black Friday shopping app installs jump 8% year over year, the report said. This could be because mobile shopping and associated app installs are now happening during the month of November as retailers have adapted to the pandemic and other online shopping trends by hosting previous sales or even months of sales events.
Credit: Sensor tower
The data seem to suggest that this is true. Between November 1 and November 29, US consumers downloaded around 59.2 million shopping apps from the App Store and Google Play – an increase of around 15% over the 51.7 million they downloaded in November 2019. That’s a much higher number than the 2% year-over-year growth in the same period of 2019.
Another shift in mobile shopping is the increasing adoption of apps by stationary retailers. In the first three quarters of 2020, brick-and-mortar retailer app installs increased 27%. That trend continued on Black Friday when 5 of the top 10 mobile shopping apps were from brick and mortar retailers led by Walmart.
Credit: Sensor tower
Walmart had the highest adoption this year with around 131,000 Black Friday installations, followed by Amazon with 106,000 and Shopify’s Shop with 81,000. A total of 763,000 new installations were carried out in the top 10 apps, which corresponds to 27% of the first-time downloads in the “Shopping” category.
As companies are only looking for new app installs, they don’t give a complete picture of the US mobile shopping market as many consumers already have these apps installed on their devices. And many more simply shop online using a desktop or laptop computer.
To give some context to those numbers, Shopify reported Saturday that it had record sales of $ 2.4 billion on Black Friday, with 68% mobile. And today Amazon announced Small business revenue alone was over $ 4.8 billion from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, up 60% year over year. However, the percentage that came from mobile devices was not reported.
Sensor tower and competing app store analytics company App Annie Largely agree with the top 5 shopping apps downloaded this Black Friday. Both saw Walmart beat Amazon again to become the most downloaded US shopping app on Black Friday – as it did in 2019. The two companies reported that Amazon remained # 2 in downloads, followed by Shopify’s shop app and Target. However, Sensor Tower placed Best Buy in 5th place, followed by Nike, while App Annie saw those positions swapped.
Credit: App Annie
The remaining top 10 of the sensor tower included SHEIN, Sam’s Club, Klarna and Offer Up, while App Annie’s list was rounded off by SHEIN, Sam’s Club, Wish and Offer Up.
The effects of the pandemic may not have been apparent given the surge in online shopping this year, but the recession that it has triggered has helped shape how US consumers pay for their purchases. “Buy now, pay later” apps like Klarna were on the rise this year and even broke into the top 10 data from the sensor tower. The company also found that many of the new shopping apps launched earlier this year focused on discounts and deals, and retailers had longer sales this year as well.