• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, December 1, 2013

Perhaps there was a lot of surreptitious smartphone Web surfing going on beneath the Thanksgiving table this year. But all signs point to T-Day being a blockbuster for mobile commerce. According to Branding Brands -- which powers m-commerce for over 200 leading brands, including American Eagle, Costco and Ralph Lauren -- visits to 46 smartphone-optimized sites for major retailers saw a 69% increase in visits over Thanksgiving 2012. But even more revealing is the explosion in actual sales coming from those devices -- up 258%.

Branding Brands was measuring smartphone-optimized sites specifically, so the data suggests the rising comfort levels consumers have with both browsing and ordering over their smaller devices. Page views from smartphones across the 49 sites compared year-over-year show 102.62% growth, and the average order size was up 15.71%. Overall across 152 sites for retailers, Branding Brands found that 32.56% of e-commerce traffic came from smartphones.

The trend continued on Black Friday, when Branding Brands also saw a year-over-year increase of 75.65% in visits and a 186.54% increase in sales from smartphones.    

Adobe, whose marketing and analytics suite monitored over 400 million visits to over 2000 U.S. retailer sites across Thanksgiving and Black Friday, says that 24% of online sales late last week occurred on smartphones or tablets -- up 118% from the same period last year.

Breaking down Adobe's data across platforms, they found that over the two days 15.6% of sales were coming from tablets and 8.6% from smartphones. The iPad remains the clear driver of device base sales -- responsible for $417 million compared to $126 million from iPhones, $106 million from Android phones and $42 million from Android tablets.

The traditional retail brands ruled the holiday shopping zeitgeist. Retailers with both online and physical presence (“bricks and clicks” brands) outsold online-only retailers during this period by nearly three to one.