The madness begins: online sales are already up 19%!

Mobile has accounted for over 26% of pre-Black Friday sales

There must have been time, long, long ago, way before any of us were even born, when Thanksgiving meant something real. Was it at one point actually about having a nice meal, seeing family and remembering all the things you had to be thankful for? I like to believe it was once like that, at least, but it's certainly not about that now. 

Now Thanksgiving, like every other holiday. expect maybe Flag Day, means two things: shopping and deals. Every year it seems to get worse, with more people willing to trample each other to save a few bucks, and the deals starting earlier and earlier.

So should it be any surprise that online shopping has already begun? In fact, this past weekend, the last one right before the Thanksgiving holiday, saw a nearly 19% increase from the same time in 2013, according to new data out from IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark on Monday.

Of course, mobile saw a big uptick as well, with 48.8% of all online traffic, a 24.45% increase year-to-year. 31.8% of all traffic came from smartphones, with only 16.5% coming from tablets. Still tablet seems to have been much better at converting sales, accounting for 17.3% of online sales, compared to 9.2% percent for smartphones.

The answer to why was the case is pretty clear ti me: people use their phones more than use tablets, and are more likely to whip them out when they have a free moment. Smartphones can be a pain to use with their relatively small screens, though, so it's likely that smartphone users e-mailed deals to themselves, and then went and bought them when they got home.

That is likely why desktop PC traffic was 51.2% of all traffic, but 73.4%  of all online sales. In all, mobile sales were 26.6%, up 23.9% from 2013.

Breaking the mobile numbers down a bit further, iOS absolutely slaughtered Google. Apple had a 28.9% higher average order, more than diuble online traffic and more than triple the percentage of sales than Android. It was not even a contest.

A bit more unexpected was Pinterest's edgind out of Facebook: the newer social network saw referral sales of $103.87, compared to $101.83 for Facebook. All was not lost for Facebook, though, as referrals converted sales at twice the rate of Pinterest.

When it comes to how much consumers spent this year, there are some interesting stats this year. People spent more money on their desktops than their mobile devices,  $123.29 per order to $105.37, a difference of 17%. The average order overall was down 5.4% year to year, to $112.86, with people only buying an average of 3.2 items.

"This trend may indicate that shoppers are becoming more comfortable and digitally savvy in how they use online coupons and rebates to secure the best bargains," IBM wrote.

Last year's shopping seson was the shortest in years. This year, the shopping season has already begun. It's going to be a long season!

This report was first spotted by TechCrunch.

(Image source: en.paperblog.com)