Convenience of tablets and smartphones accelerate online sales, blurring the distinction between online and offline retailing

Research Triangle Park, NC – November 26, 2012 – ChannelAdvisor, a leading provider of cloud-based e-commerce solutions that enable retailers and manufacturers to increase global sales, today announced that online traffic from smartphones and tablets to its retailer and manufacturer customers nearly doubled year-over-year during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Additionally, ChannelAdvisor customers’ “same-store sales” on Amazon and eBay increased significantly year-over-year throughout the four days leading up to Cyber Monday; ChannelAdvisor customers experienced a 40.3 percent increase in sales on Amazon and 32.1 percent increase on eBay compared to the same long weekend last year. Information about ChannelAdvisor’s calculation of mobile traffic and same-store sales is included later in this press release.

“We watched our customers’ smartphone and tablet traffic pick up throughout the month of November, increasing to 36.9 percent of their total traffic on Thanksgiving Day, nearly double the 19.2 percent from Thanksgiving Day last year,” said ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo. “For the holiday so far, customers’ mobile traffic is trending toward nearly 40 percent of their overall traffic as compared to non-holiday periods, when mobile traffic averages about 25 percent of total traffic. I suspect that when the dust settles, the entire retail ecosystem will be rethinking and reprioritizing their mobile efforts.”

Highlights from Thanksgiving Day for ChannelAdvisor customers include the following:

• Amazon same-store sales accelerated throughout the day, ending with a 34.9 percent increase over 2011
• eBay same-store sales slowed in the evening hours but enjoyed solid overall performance, increasing 26.6 percent over the previous year
• Paid search same-store sales increased on Thanksgiving Day, growing 23.9 percent over 2011
• Comparison shopping engine same-store sales increased 14.2 percent, largely attributed to the toy and electronics categories

“In addition to our own proprietary data pointing to the adoption of mobile commerce, we believe both Amazon and eBay continue to benefit from mobile platforms as well, as they provide consumers with the simplest and most direct interfaces to transact on mobile devices,” continued Wingo. “Altogether, these overall increases suggest that consumers are shopping earlier than before, and that mobile commerce is a mainstream phenomenon. Retailers will have to redouble their efforts to both optimize their mobile presence and leverage aggregators like Amazon and eBay to fully capture consumers’ attention.”

Other ChannelAdvisor customer highlights from the first four days of the Cyber Five include:

• Amazon and eBay continue to gain share of online sales, gradually increasing as the weekend progressed compared to 2011
• On Cyber Saturday, eBay continued to exceed expectations, growing three times the pace of last holiday season
• Amazon quickly sold out of many popular toys and some electronics, which allowed third-party retailers to gain share of the Buy Box in those items
• Cyber Sunday was the strongest day of the weekend for eBay, increasing by 39 percent to beat Amazon’s growth rate for the first time this holiday season

For more information on the Cyber Five, please visit http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/.

Calculation of Same-store Sales and Mobile Traffic

ChannelAdvisor calculates same-store sales based on the gross merchandise value (GMV) processed through the Channel Advisor platform by customers that have been using ChannelAdvisor software for at least a year, removing any customer additions or attritions.

To calculate mobile traffic, ChannelAdvisor aggregates the mobile traffic to its customers generated through its Comparison Shopping and Paid Search solutions.

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