U.S. Consumers Now Spent Over 5 Hours Per Day on Mobile Devices

Flurry, a division of Yahoo, in their blog post about the State of Mobile provides some interesting insights to mobile usage by consumers.

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In Q4 of 2016, U.S. consumers spent over 5 hours per day on mobile devices, that is up from just over 4 hours per day just a year ago.

While 51% of the time is spent in social, messaging, media, and entertainment applications, much of that fueled by Communitainment, communication for the sole purpose of entertainment, the percentage spent in using the browser on mobile held relative steady from 9% in 2015 to 8% in 2016.

Lifestyle and shopping apps are taking a full 5% of mobile time (about 15 minutes per day), much of it a likely from major Marketplace apps such as Amazon and eBay.

Instead of boring you with all the stats, here is nice graphic created by the folks at Flurry.

This growing trend of mobile use makes it even more important to make sure your eCommerce business is capturing this growing market.

Since 8% of the time is spent in a browser (about 24 minutes per day), your website needs to be mobile friendly. If you have not taken any steps to ensure your site’s mobile friendliness, this is the time to do it.

Not only is the growing use of mobile a factor, but also the increased importance by Google and other search engines, to “downgrade” mobile unfriendly websites makes it a necessity today to be mobile friendly.

You should also take a long hard look at your eBay and Amazon listings. Again, while this data was not provided, it is reasonable to believe that eBay and Amazon are a major slice of time spent shopping on mobile devices.

With eBay you do have more control over how your listings look on mobile so you should take advantage of them:

1. Pictures, Pictures and did we say Pictures. High resolution pictures on today’s smart phones can make the sale
2. Item Specifics are of great importance in mobile apps. Use all that are available to use in your category
3. Short and to the point descriptions. Remember, mobile buyers are not going to be scrolling forever through a long listing

On Amazon, your control is limited, especially if you are selling products that other sellers are offering and you could restricted by existing Amazon ASIN listings.

But if you are creating your own listings on Amazon, here are the main points for making them better for mobile users:

1. Pictures. Pretty self explanatory by now
2. 5 Bullet Points, make sure you have relevant information in them
3. Short and to the point descriptions, just like your eBay listings should be

We hope this data inspires you to take a look at your mobile presentation strategy and let us what steps you may have taken to make your eCommerce business more mobile friendly.

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