Jackthreads' cyber-weekend highlights: $3M in sales, 70% of traffic from mobile

Like most online retailers, Jackthreads has seen the light when it comes to mobile.

After launching a completely revamped Android app two months ago, Jackthreads says it saw more than 70 percent of traffic between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday coming from mobile devices. The company also reached $3 million in sales for that “cyber-weekend” period, around twice its sales from last year, founder and chief executive Jason Ross told VentureBeat exclusively.

Typically, Jackthreads sees around 65 percent of its traffic and around 50 percent of its sales coming from mobile.

There’s no big secret to Jackthreads’ mobile success: If you build a decent mobile experience, shoppers will come. Walmart, for example, said that around 53 percent of its Thanksgiving traffic came from mobile shoppers. It doesn’t take much effort to launch a mobile site or app and start browsing, and now consumers are also growing comfortable with making big purchases on mobile devices.

Jackthreads, in particular, has spent the past few years developing slick mobile app experience that makes its traditional web experience feel practically archaic (and that you can get mobile notifications about deals likely helps as well). The company launched a subpar Android app last year, which it followed up with a more refined app a few months ago. (As a Jackthreads user who often jumps between platforms, I find the new Android app on-par with the company’s well-made iOS apps, though it’s not yet optimized for Android tablets.)

“We think our shopping experience is a big part of why we’ve come as far as we have,” Ross told me. “We make it so easy for our guys to shop. I think that’s why mobile has been so successful. … Our mobile experience is only about things that are 100 percent essential.”