Groupon maintained its spot as the top mobile commerce app, but Best Buy saw the biggest overall one-day gain on Black Friday, according to Onavo, a Sequoia-backed mobile data compression startup.
Usage of Best Buy and Walmart’s iOS apps jumped by more than fivefold last Friday and Thursday night. Following them were Kohl’s, Target and ShopSavvy. Onavo didn’t include Amazon in their study.
Onavo collected the data for their report through a sample of about 130,000 U.S. iPhone users last week. They’re an Israeli company that gets live insight into daily app usage through two consumer products: Onavo Extend, which helps consumers save on their mobile bills by compressing data usage and Onavo Count, which tells you how much data you’re using. Because they have millions of users, they can peek into daily mobile traffic to different apps.
Plus, because Onavo creates consumer-facing products and doesn’t work directly with developers, the company can publish data on active usage for specific apps. This is unlike mobile analytics companies like Flurry, which can’t really disclose performance of specific apps because developers would probably not work with them.
The apps with the overall highest usage last Friday were the group deals apps Groupon and LivingSocial, followed by Walmart, Target and eBay’s Red Laser.
Overall, comScore reported that U.S. retail e-commerce spending topped $1 billion for the first time this year. They said e-commerce spending jumped 26 percent from the year before to $1.042 billion. comScore said Amazon was the most popular e-commerce site by visits, followed by Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and Apple. eBay-owned PayPal also reported that Black Friday global mobile payments volume was up 193 percent from last year.