It’s no secret that this year’s holiday shopping season has been a major boon to mobile shopping apps. Scanbuy’s mobile barcode app reported seeing a 30 times increase in scans over Thanksgiving weekend, eBay reported mobile sales were up 146% over last year, and Mobclix reported that mobile ad impressions in iPhone shopping apps grew by 249%. These are just a few of several data points that show the momentum mobile shopping is gaining as we head into 2011.
Today, mobile shopping app ShopSavvy came out with stats indicating that it was downloaded over 2.15 million times during November alone, representing the best month of downloads the company has seen since its initial launch in 2008. Between November 1st and 30th, the app was downloaded 1.4 million times on iPhone and 750,000 times on Android.
On iPhone, 1 million of those downloads were people updating their current apps, with the other 400,000 being completely new users. The company issued a sizable upgrade to the app in early November that added several social features, which attributed to the massive number of upgrade-based downloads for iPhone users.
These new so-called “social shopping” features that were added recently added what the company called “Wikipedia-style crowdsourcing” for shoppers. If a user scans a product that’s not currently in ShopSavvy’s central database, the user can add it along with its relevant information, for example. The normal social sharing features in terms of ratings, reviews and connectivity to Facebook and Twitter were also added to the app.
