Mobile retail site visits increasing year-over-year in Canada, desktop traffic decreasing

Canadians are shopping more often on their smartphones than they are through desktop computers.

Comscore, an American measurement and analytics company, has released a study looking into Canadian consumer shopping patterns over the past few years. Overall, the firm found that the number of unique mobile visitors has increased by 22 percent to 19 million since 2015. In contrast, while 23 million people used desktop to shop, this marked a five percent drop year-over-year. Comscore suggests that customers find it easier to browse and compare products using their phones.

Canadians also like to order their pizzas with their phones. The top three delivery sites — Dominos, Pizza Pizza and Pizza Hut — all showed year-on-year growths of at least 25 percent.

The mobile payments industry is growing as well, with 38 percent of Canadians now using their phones for e-payments or money transfers, compared to 32 percent last year. This number will no doubt continue to grow now that Android Pay is available in Canada as of May 31st.

There were also some specific figures related to the top eight retail chains, which all saw marked growth in mobile traffic.

According to the figures, this means:

• 2 out of 8 top retail brands have over 50 percent mobile-only visitors
• 6 out of 8 top retail brands had double digit growth in mobile-only visitors
• 5 out of top 8 retail brands saw a decrease in desktop-only visitors

However, while Canadians are turning to mobile to browse sites, Comscore notes they still tend to make purchases through desktop. From December 2015 to December 2016, the dollars-per-buyer amount for desktop users was 48 percent higher than that found for mobile users.

Some other general interesting figures:

• Visitors spend an average of 152 minutes on mobile each month
• 87 percent of the total digital population visited a retail website at least once each month
• 16 billion pages have been visited using a desktop or mobile device

Canadian companies are also embracing mobile-specific options for their customers. According to a report from May, over 75 percent of retailers acknowledged that mobile commerce is the “way of the future.”

Source: Comscore