Q4 Retail Holiday Shopping? There’s an App for That

You have to be living under a rock if you haven’t heard about the tremendous growth of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude.

Though early adopters are using LLMs for their shopping search and discovery, my money is on mobile apps dominating Q4 holiday shopping in 2026.

History Doesn’t Lie

According to research from EMARKETER, 57 percent of the 2026 Q4 retail sales are predicted to be via mobile phones. According to data from EMARKETER in 2021, only 45.9 percent of retail sales were via mobile phones. The forecast for Q4 2026 would represent an increase of 24 percent from five years ago. The research firm also expects 90 percent of the net increase in e-commerce sales to come from mobile channels, as e-commerce sales are predicted to increase by 6.6 percent vs. an overall increase of 2.6 percent in retail sales for the Q4 holiday season.

The real value of mobile commerce is that our mobile phones are always with us. That means that shoppers can use their mobile stores while they’re in-store to compare prices or save products for future purchase. For fashion and beauty products, the mobile phone enables a shopper to later purchase a product he/she wanted to see in-store to make sure that the size, color, and/or fit met their needs.

Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence technology, retailers can now offer more personalized recommendations to their customers in-app, and utilize SMS and push notifications as well as digital payments for a more effective cross-channel buying experience.

AI … is Coming

Though AI will undoubtedly change how we search and discover new products and services, for closing the sale, retailer apps will deliver this holiday season.

Last September ChatGPT rolled out the company’s Instant Checkout offering relying on the Agentic Commerce Protocol, initially available for Etsy sellers. However, that offering appears to have been shelved, instead enabling the checkout experience to be managed through the respective merchant’s ChatGPT app.

According to reporting in Modern Retail, ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout didn’t drive many sales and some merchants didn’t want the company to oversee the checkout experience for their customers.

Regardless, it doesn’t appear that the retailer apps within the ChatGPT app store are delivering sales or much value to the retailers that have launched them. According to agency people and analysts interviewed by Modern Retail, there aren’t any success stories yet among the retailer apps that have launched. Though hundreds of millions of users access ChatGPT every month, they need to download and install a retailer’s app from the ChatGPT app store, which might explain the low adoption by users. Furthermore, this is generation 1.0 of these apps, and it’s still not clear when and how users will ultimately engage and shop with LLMs.

Though I wouldn’t rule out future retail experiences via LLMs, for Q4 2026, the LLMs will primarily provide search and discovery before handing off the experience to the app to close the sale.

Is Your App Ready for the Q4 Holidays?

From one-click purchases to in-app social commerce, there are lots of tactics that will increase sales and revenue for your apps this holiday season.

Though retail has become a multichannel experience, there are ways to tie the mobile app to other channels and the in-store experience. Physical retailers should provide users with reasons to check out their app, even while they’re in-store. Whether it’s a discount or access to products not available elsewhere, the retailers that drive cross-channel engagement via their apps will build strong cross-channel relationships and, ultimately, sell more.

Though between 73 percent to 81 percent of Q4 holiday sales are predicted to occur in physical stores, the retailers that engage with their customers and rely on loyalty program best practices will benefit from increased sales. And there's no better channel to initiate customer engagement than through the always-by-my-side mobile phone via the retailer’s app.

Keren Shlush is the head of marketing at Zoomd, a marketing technology user acquisition and engagement platform.