‘Black November’ Serves up Highest Mobile Website Traffic in ’16 And Doubles the Sales for Independent Retailers

Retailer Web Services (RWS), which began tracking comprehensive Black Friday stats on its network of retailer customer websites in 2015, recently announced that for Black Friday 2016, as well as the month of November, independent retailers of durable home goods saw significant increases in online traffic, mobile use and sales over last year’s Black Friday holiday, according to . The software solutions company has released the following results and analysis as of Nov. 30, 2016:

• The percentage of site visits from mobile devices nearly doubled from last year, 51 percent last month, compared to 27 percent in November 2015.
• Black Friday remained the No. 1 day of the year for overall traffic, sales and quote requests generated for the second year in a row.
• The amount of November sales RWS retailer customer sites generated for these local businesses more than doubled year over year: more than $43 million in '16; $21 million in '15.
• In 2016, 24 of the 30 days with the highest traffic were in November, reinforcing that it's "Black November" now, according to RWS.
• In both 2015 and ’16, Thanksgiving Day was the No. 1 day of the year for mobile traffic.

"Year over year, not only were more people looking at our retailers' websites in November, a considerably higher percentage were looking at them on smart phones," said RWS Chief Operating Officer Jennie Gilbert. "These results show the shift to mobile in consumer online shopping behaviors—and the need for independent retailers' sites to not only accommodate the mobile shopper in an engaging relevant way, but to win their business."

For those RWS retailer customers with Level 4 WebFronts, there were many Black Friday digital deals to be had for consumers—more than 4,000 promotion landing pages—across the RWS network on the biggest names in home appliances and mattresses. The digital promotions that ran between Oct. 30 and Nov. 30 resulted in:

• Thousands of phone calls placed directly from mobile websites to independent retailers; hundreds of GPS navigations directly to the physical stores from mobile sites.
• More than 71 million banner views to retailer websites' home pages.
• More than 2.5 million landing pages visits
• Navigation to nearly 2 million individual products associated with the promotions
• More than 33,000 rebate forms downloaded

During the busiest shopping holiday of the year, Sarah Richardson of KAM Appliances, a family-owned discount appliance store based in Cape Cod, Mass., made use of KAM’s Level 4 WebFront to keep track of online campaigns. "With three store locations (Hyannis, Nantucket and Hanover) and a variety of marketing programming going on, everything leads back to our website," said Richardson. "Level 4's best tool is the marketing analytics; we're able to track the activity from the mobile site, how many emails are opened, rebate forms and more."

More about Retailer Web Services: Founded in 2006, Retailer Web Services (RWS) is a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based provider of digital marketing, ecommerce, web design and other intelligent software solutions built exclusively for independent retailers of durable home goods to achieve success. A champion of independent retailers, RWS is an authoritative source on durable goods product data and consumer purchasing habits. RE:THiNK: 11 surprising things you should do now to win retail customers in the digital age (RWS, 2015) provides actionable advice grounded in the way consumers shop for durable goods. RWS serves more than 2,000 independent durable goods retailers across North America. For more information, visit www.retailerwebservices.com.
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