Commentary
29% of Online Christmas Sales Come via Mobile
- by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, December 26, 2013
Christmas was yet another busy day for mobile commerce.
It also was a busy day for the computers at IBM, as its Digital Analytics Benchmark continued to track and compare shopping activity from this year to last.
Mobile accounted for almost half (48%) of all online traffic, an increase of 28% from the same period last year, according to the latest IBM data.
From a commerce standpoint, mobile also was strong, increasing 40 percent over last year to almost a third (29%) of all online sales.
Consistent with other research, the IBM stats showed that people shopped by phone and bought via tablet.
While smartphones drove much (29%) of online traffic compared to tablets (18%), more of the sales occurred on tablets (19%) compared to smartphones (9%).
Tablet users also spent an average of $96 per order, compared to smartphone spending that averaged $85 an order.
As a percentage of online sales, iOS devices were higher (23% of sales) than Android spending (5%), also consistent with numerous other studies and iOS users spend an average of $94 per order compared to Android users who spent an average of $48 per order.
The more significant issue here is the scope of influence of both smartphones and tablets on shopping activity.
As many consumers received new smartphones and tablets as gifts this season, this activity is likely to continue increasing.
This holiday season is just the beginning of the massive scope of mobile commerce on the way.
Chuck Martin is Editor of the AI & IoT Daily at MediaPost and writes the daily Connected Thinking column. He is a NY Times Business bestselling author and his latest book is “Digital Transformation 3.0” (The New Business-to-Consumer Connections of The Internet of Things.) He is CEO of Net Future Institute and a frequent keynote speaker internationally. Follow him on Twitter @chuckmartin and contact him at Chuck@MediaPost.com.
Interesting that mobile was 48% of traffic, so a lot of people are watching Netflix etc on their mobile devices. Contrast this to mobile being only 28% of sales - I think the two together demonstrate that a lot of mobiles (especially low-end Android mobiles) are used as dedicated entertainment consumption devices rather than to replace PCs.