Blue Nile Customers Regularly Buy $100,000 Diamonds Via Phone App, Says CEO

Blue Nile’s customers are “regularly” buying $100,000 diamonds using their smartphones, the company’s CEO Harvey Kanter said in a recent interview.

While the Seattle-based e-tailer has talked about making big sales via its phone app before, Kanter told Motley Fool they are becoming increasingly common.
“We traditionally, regularly with some degree of—not necessarily a weekly cadence—but cadence, sell $100,000 stones off of iPhones and Androids,” he said. “It’s kind of mesmerizing to me. I would have had [the perspective of], ‘Is that a realistic expectation?’ But the reality is, it is.”
“The younger customer is very, very accessible and, even more importantly, has grown up with the phone, to the point where their phone is actually their PC and they don't go to a normal PC,” he said. “The older folks may still look at the PC as the No. 1 place to go, but younger folks today, and our core customer—who is about 30 years old, buying engagement settings—really goes to a mobile device first.”
He noted the company also sold a $200,000 engagement ring off a tablet.
“People are absolutely shopping on an iPad,” he told Motley Fool.
Kanter noted that 40 percent of his company’s traffic comes from mobile devices, and it expects that share to climb to 50 percent by the end of the year. And while most customers continue to conduct the actual transaction on a PC, he expects that to eventually change, too.
“Our expectation is that as more and more consumers go to mobile devices … as customers [get] more comfortable with actually making the transaction fully on a mobile device,” he said.