Do Amazon Shoppers Still Use Computers?

In 2005, the Monday after Thanksgiving was first promoted as Cyber Monday.  Retailers encouraged consumers to shop online that day, after shopping in person on Black Friday. What we sometimes forget is why: as e-commerce grew in popularity in the early 2000s, consumers needed to use their workplace or office desktop computers for online shopping. There were no screen-based smartphones, and more than half of home computer users relied on slow dial-up modems for their Internet connections. 

Since then, we’ve seen a pronounced shift toward shopping on mobile devices. Amazon has experienced this, and perhaps ushered it in, as much as any retailer. In the past five years, Amazon’s percentage of sales through smartphones and other mobile devices has approximately doubled. The app economy, phones with larger screens and faster cellular connections, and retail websites that are responsive to computer, tablet, and smartphone screen sizes and often designed for mobile shopping, changed everything.