Thank God It's Sunday! For mobile shoppers

NEW DELHI, INDIA:  Mobile shoppers seem to be most active on Sundays.  Unlike desktop traffic to e-commerce sites, which tends to peak on Mondays and remains stronger during weekdays than on weekends, mobile shopping traffic is highly concentrated on Sundays. One possible explanation is that many consumers use their mobile devices to browse products over the weekend, then revisit and purchase when they return to their desks on Monday. The day with the lowest mobile shopping traffic is Friday.

A new report from Opera reveals how consumers use their mobile devices to shop online. It breaks down mobile shopping trends by time of year, days of the week and geography, and showcases the top mobile sites and advertisers of this holiday season.

?"Online shopping has become a major force in global markets. And, with the holiday shopping season upon us in the United States, we see mobile's share of that market accelerating," says Larry Moores, Vice President for Consumer Mobile Reporting and Analytics at Opera Software.

In India, Saturdays and Sundays are the most popular days to shop with a decline on Mondays and through mid-week. The decline however is very marginal as Indians enjoy a shopping spree throughout the week. October sees highest volume of traffic to mobile shopping sites in India and the total market for mobile online shopping has also grown significantly over the last year. As we close 2014 we expect that over 35 per cent of mobile users will now be actively shopping with their mobile devices. Interaction of Indians with mobile shopping sites (measured by page views) is also growing impressively. Over the last one year, it has more than doubled, growing by over 106 per cent, Opera points out.

In the rest of Asia, however, March is the peak month for volume, followed closely by July. This is largely due to Ramadan starting in late June and ending in late July this year.

As expected, the Christmas season is the most active time for shopping in Europe, the United States and Latin America. Western Europe has a noticeably strong preference for shopping during November and December. Germany in particular shows a large increase in the number of shoppers during this period.

Last year, at this time, OLX and Quikr lead the market in a virtual tie for the top spot for India's mobile shoppers. However, over the last year, Flipkart has grown its market presence tremendously and is now the market leader. Amazon has also seen significant growth in India. On a global scale, Amazon remains the leader but there are some relative newcomers that have taken strong leadership positions in other regions such as Berniaga in Indonesia, Alibaba in China and MercadoLibre in Latin America.

Also, in October and November of this year, the majority of global impressions on the Opera Mediaworks mobile ad platform came from ad campaigns for games, followed by computers and electronics. However, when looking at ad spend, companies selling mobile phone services came out on top, followed by home improvement stores. Apparel brands and jewelry came fairly low on the list.

The company informs that this report’s insights are sourced from anonymous, aggregated data from the 270 million users of Opera Software’s mobile browsers, combined with data from the Opera Mediaworks mobile ad platform, which as claimed, serves 65 billion ad impressions a month on over 17,500 mobile sites and apps and reaches 800 million consumers globally.