Shopping isn't limited by time and place anymore — it's always on. With mobile devices and e-commerce options always at the ready, consumer habits have fundamentally changed. Current estimates predict mobile commerce will make up 48% of all e-commerce sales this holiday season, up 28% over 2018 and representing nearly $70 billion in spending.

To keep up, marketers need to understand the rewiring of the customer-purchase journey and rethink their traditional funnel approach. Essentially, the funnel is becoming shorter and more streamlined. We've partnered with leading retailers to identify three new ways to address this shift and inspire 2020 strategies.

Bridge the gap between discovery and purchase

Retailers need to develop new approaches that engage customers much earlier — at the discovery and consideration phases. In Verizon Media's holiday shopper study, 76% of consumers said they enjoyed making unexpected discoveries when shopping, and 85% of consumers said they take a product-related action within 24 hours of discovering a product. These actions could include reading reviews, comparing prices, or purchasing the product — sometimes all at once.

Marketers can engage their audience with content that's as informative as it is entertaining, including gift guides, lookbooks, and videos. In Verizon Media's 2019 commerce study, 70% of advertisers say that brand-building tactics like these are worth the investment and video ads are particularly effective, with a 1.6 times greater transaction rate than static images.

With the help of innovative integrated solutions like our new shoppable video carousel users can explore and purchase items featured in a video — shortening the path from discovery to purchase.

Extend the retail experience to new realities

Adults are spending an average of three hours and 35 minutes per day on mobile devices, and extended reality (or XR) ad formats can enhance a brand's experience on mobile.

These innovative formats allow consumers to visualize products in real-world environments, seamlessly blending digital and physical spaces to make purchase decisions easier. Brands can provide a new kind of enhanced utility and deliver brick-and-mortar shopping experience anywhere.

Exploring a product online creates a greater sense of confidence in consumers' purchase decisions. In fact, 49% of shoppers are more likely to purchase a product if they can experience it online first — and XR does this on an entirely new dimension.

Opportunities with AR and commerce are flexible, enabling shoppers to try on or try out products and easily share the results. One popular retailer ran an AR campaign and saw shoppers spending an average of 2.4 minutes interacting with the ads. Audiences also feel better about their purchase decisions after exploring AR ads, with 64% of shoppers gaining more confidence after using the feature.

Show up with deals when they are ready to shop

Discounts have always been retailers' key to drive action, and 94% of all online shoppers are on the hunt for the best price. To do so, more than half of all shoppers visit four websites or more, and more than one-third of shoppers spend about 30 minutes or more searching for the best deal.

With native advertising, marketers can create interactive experiences that put deals in front of consumers and motivate them to take action. Native advertising can include partnerships with commerce experiences, like Yahoo Shopping or Yahoo Mail's deals section, to create custom integrations, or native ads formats, also known as in-feed ads.

Native ad formats are increasingly data-driven, encourage product exploration, and can eliminate steps to conversion. According to data from Appreciate, brands that ran in-app native ads during the 2018 holiday season saw the highest ROI among their peers. New format features can transform an advertiser's message into valuable coupons or create shoppable content directly within an ad that can reach shoppers anywhere.

As mobile consumers continue to shift to an "anytime, anywhere" shopping model, marketers are rewiring the path to purchase. Those that can figure out how to best apply innovative solutions that make shopping simpler and more fun will be the brands to watch.

At Verizon Media, we're focused on developing powerful commerce experiences that connect brands with the hundreds of millions of monthly users who visit our platforms. Each experience is designed to be valuable, relevant, and useful, and reach consumers at their highest point of engagement — when they're actively looking for deals and coupons. And all of them help marketers uncover opportunities, deliver quality experiences, and improve performance.