Brief:

• Payment company PayPal said its mobile transaction volume surged 42% to a record of more than $1 billion on Black Friday, TechCrunch reported. Mobile payment growth expanded at a faster pace on Black Friday than on Cyber Monday, which also rose to more than $1 billion as more consumers used smartphones to shop.
• Mobile payment volume from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday made up 43% of PayPal's total payment volume worldwide. During those days, PayPal processed more than $25,000 a second, $11,000 of which came from mobile purchases, per TechCrunch.
• Thanksgiving and Giving Tuesday also saw major lifts in spend from last year. Thanksgiving is now one of the top 10 shopping days of the year, with total payment volume, including mobile transactions, up 41% from last year. PayPal reported $98 million worth of charitable donations — up 51% from 2017 — on Giving Tuesday this year.

Insight:

Mobile devices are growing increasingly important for on-the-go payments, pointing to how marketers need to ensure their apps and mobile websites can handle a surge in visitor traffic and payment volume. At the same time, this highlights how stores should focus on integrating new payments options during peak shopping seasons, including in-store payments via mobile wallets, PayPal, wearables and scan-and-go options.

PayPal's data confirm other reports of higher mobile shopping activity throughout the Thanksgiving week to Cyber Monday. Shopping revenue from smartphones surged 48.1% to $2.1 billion on Cyber Monday from $1.4 billion a year earlier, according to estimates by Adobe Analytics. Mobile made up 51.4% of site visits, with smartphones overshadowing tablets as the preferred mobile device, and 34% of revenue, the first Cyber Monday with more than half of visits coming from mobile. Retailers with more than $1 billion annual e-commerce revenue saw 6% higher conversion rates on smartphones, which Adobe said was a sign that investments in improving the mobile shopping experience had paid off.

Meanwhile, Amazon said customers ordered more than 4 million toys and electronics on its mobile app on Black Friday. The e-commerce giant also had record sales over the holiday weekend, including the biggest shopping day in company history on Cyber Monday. The best-selling products that day included mobile tech such as the Echo Dot smart speaker and Bose headphones for Apple devices.

The top 10 shopping apps on Apple's App Store boosted their first-time downloads by 16.3% on Black Friday, adding about a half million new users, according to Sensor Tower research. Walmart's app installations jumped 39.7% to an estimated 95,000 first-time users that day, while Amazon added about 115,000 new users of its flagship app, up 11.7% from 2017. Best Buy was the top specialty retailer in Sensor Tower's ranking with 39,000 new app installs, up 34.5% from a year earlier. Target, the third-most installed app overall, saw new app installs grow just 3.3% from the prior year to about 62,000, Sensor Tower said.