Black Friday Mobile Shopping Data Demonstrates Growth Opportunity for Retailers

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Nov. 30, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Mobidia Technology, Inc., a leading provider of mobile analytics, today released new insight into mobile shopping in the U.S. on Black Friday. Mobidia's data highlights the growing importance of mobile shopping among smartphone and tablet users, and highlights their preference for online retailers. With more than 119 million U.S. smartphone users, Mobidia's data suggests a significant opportunity for retailers, app vendors, device manufacturers, mobile operators, and advertisers who invest in more innovative mobile shopping experiences.

An analysis of mobile application usage on November 23^rd, Black Friday in the U.S., highlights the following trends:

• Shopping on mobile devices is significant. Of the consumers who track their data usage with Mobidia's My Data Manager, 12 percent used a smartphone shopping application on Black Friday. When applied to the entire U.S. population, this suggests approximately 14 million consumers used their smartphones on Black Friday to shop. That is 30 percent more than the average of 9.5 percent on previous days in 2012, demonstrating the importance of Black Friday for mobile shoppers.
• On average, mobile shoppers spent 16 percent more time using shopping applications on Black Friday when compared to previous days in 2012.
• Shoppers spent more than 10 minutes using the most popular shopping applications on Black Friday. This is significant when compared to usage of the most popular mobile applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, web browsers and maps, which had average usage times of 12 to 22 minutes on that day.
• Online retailers saw the most traffic on their shopping apps. Applications from Amazon and EBay had more than five times the usage when compared with the mobile apps from traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.

See Figure 1 U.S., Smartphone Users, Time Spent in Shopping and Popular Mobile Apps., November 23, 2012.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121130/SF21574-a)

See Figure 2 U.S., Percentage of Mobile Shoppers Using Online Retailers' Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Apps from Traditional Retailers, November 23, 2012.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121130/SF21574-b)

"As expected, our Black Friday analysis showed that many consumers shopped on their smartphones on Black Friday, but shoppers appear to be gravitating toward online retailers for their mobile shopping," says Chris Hill, vice president of marketing at Mobidia. "This could be attributed to shoppers' experience with online shopping on desktop computers, unsatisfying experiences with the shopping apps of traditional retailers, or just a general lack of awareness. Whatever the reason, Mobidia's data highlights this as a big opportunity for traditional retailers to continue innovating their mobile shopping app development and marketing to capture more of the mobile shopping market."

With a global set of data provided by hundreds of thousands of smartphone users, Mobidia is able to provide mobile operators and the global mobile industry ecosystem with detailed and unique insight into subscriber behavior surrounding data- and application-specific usage on all the networks to which smartphones and tablets connect, including mobile cellular (and LTE), roaming and Wi-Fi. The data also includes both aggregate data amounts consumed by and time spent in specific applications and services.

For more information about Mobidia's mobile data, please visit Mobidia's website, where you will find detailed whitepapers, or Mobidia's Blog for periodic updates on data and analysis of mobile usage.

Note to Editor:

Mobidia analyzed data collected November 23, 2012 and previously this year from more than 100,000 Android users in the U.S. to analyze Black Friday shopping trends. This data was collected on a strictly anonymous and optional basis from a sample approaching three million users who have downloaded Mobidia's smartphone application, My Data Manager. The data sample represents smartphone users from all major and minor networks in the U.S.

About Mobidia Technology, Inc.

Mobidia develops and delivers intelligent, client-based solutions for enhancing wireless data with leading mobile operators around the world. Mobidia's popular My Data Manager application has been downloaded over 2.4 million times by subscribers around the world looking to better manage their mobile data usage and data plans. Mobidia offers a white-labeled version of the application to mobile operators for customizing to increase subscriber satisfaction and decrease care costs, to increase the efficiency of up-selling and cross-selling promotions, and to develop a unique view of usage trends across cellular, roaming, and Wi-Fi networks. A cloud-based architecture allows for integration with back end billing and analytics systems.

Mobidia is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia with local presence in the U.S., Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.mobidia.com or call 604-304-8640.

SOURCE Mobidia Technology, Inc.