eBags' Record-Breaking Holiday Mobile Strategy

We’ve all seen the Black Friday/Cyber Monday stats — shoppers spent $1.9 billion online on Thanksgiving Day and another $3.3 billion on Black Friday, according to Adobe Data. Black Friday 2016 was also the first time in history that mobile sales topped $1 billion.

eBags, an online retailer of handbags, luggage, backpacks, laptop bags and travel accessories, was one brand that specifically felt this big shift to mobile during the holiday shopping weekend.

“What we're seeing is all the investments we’ve made on our user experience have paid off in conversion, and as a result, we're capitalizing on that natural traffic that’s shifting online from traditional brick-and-mortar retail,” explains eBags CEO Mike Edwards.

eBags’ mobile traffic grew 92 percent between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. Forty-six percent of website visits and 21 percent of sales came from a mobile device.

Edwards says there were two parts to eBags’ mobile strategy:

• Speed: The e-commerce retailer has created a “really fast mobile experience” so that consumers are able to find what they're looking for in under four seconds. Edwards explains that his team de-cluttered product landing pages to take the friction out of mobile search.
• Checkout process: eBags’ checkout process formerly had seven steps for shoppers to complete before the transaction was done. For the 2016 holiday season, eBags reduced that to just two steps.

“We’ve enhanced our mobile payment solutions with PayPal,” says Edwards. “We made it so even if you wanted to redeem a coupon upon entering our mobile site, it was just one click without having to enter in a code.”

Best Month of the Year
Back in November, a post-election website traffic dip resulted in $800 million of lost sales from Nov. 1 to Nov. 14 for retailers across the country, with the sharpest drop coming immediately after the election.

“There was a lot of anxiety with the customer, but that seems to have subsided,” says Edwards. “Now, customers are very confident in planning and making purchases for the holidays. As a result, our business in December so far is the best month of the year — and that’s on top of a 15 percent growth rate last year.”

Edwards hopes eBags will continue the success of holiday 2016 into 2017. January and February are also big months for the retailer because, as Edwards explains, that’s when people start planning spring travel.

“eBags is very travel-centric," notes Edwards. "Travel is growing at 6 percent a year and e-commerce is growing at 15 percent a year. We will analyze our traffic and site performance, and re-prioritize what advances we want to add to our mobile app, shopping experience and, ultimately, our site.”