Christmas Day stats are in: iOS whooped Android!

Shopping on Christmas Day up 16.5% from 2012, with 29% of sales coming from mobile

Overall online shopping this holiday season has been somewhat disappointing, coming in several percentage points lower than was expected, at least in terms of desktop sales.

But there is one more big shopping day that has not been counted yet: Christmas Day! Maybe enough people wanted to get away from their families to sit and browse Amazon to save the day!

Sales on Christmas Day rose 16.5% year to year, according to data from IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark on Friday. No actual numbers were provided, however.

The real story this year seems to be the rise of mobile, with traffic up 28.3% year to year, the highest it has ever been. Sales rose even higher, going up 40% from 2012 and accounting for 29% of all online sales on the day.

When it came to which devices people were using, smartphones easily beat out tablets in terms of traffic, 28.5% to 18.1%. As we've seen before, though, tablets won the day, with 19.4% of all online sales, compared to 9.3% for smartphones.

Tablet users also spent $10.50 more than smartphone users, plunking down an average of $95.61 per order. 

This is not a new trend; I feel like every shopping day I hear the same thing: more people used their smartphones, but more people bought on tablets. That likely has to do with the larger screen, which makes it easier to see what you are buying, combined with the ease of use.

Looking at which platform won out on Christmas Day this year, it was no contest: iOS users drove more sales and traffic, and spent more than their Android counterparts.

Traffic on iOS was 32.6% on iOS, while Android only saw 14.8%. In terms of spending per order, iOS nearly doubled Android's average sale. $93.94 to $48.10. But it was on percentage of total sales that iOS just crushed its rival. Absolutely demolished it. 

Android drove only 4.6% of total online sales, compared to 23% for iOS. That means that iOS had more than five times the percentage of sales!

And, finally, there was social media, with Facebook have a staredown with Pinterest. The result was a mixed bag though.

While Pinterest shoppers did spend more, $86.83 per order compared to $72.01 on Facebook, it was the latter that converted more sales.  Facebook referrals converted sales at nearly four times the rate of Pinterest referrals, perhaps indicating stronger confidence in network recommendations.

Shopping season

The overall holiday shopping season has not been quite as robust as some had hoped.

Starting from November 1st until December 22nd, retail e-commerce spending in the United States, done from a desktop computer, was $42.8 billion, according to data released from comScore.

Despite that being an increase of 10% over the $38.9 billion spent in the same period in 2012, it was still seen as a disappointment, since comScore had previously predicted that sales would rise 14% instead.

So how did each individual day stack up?

Thanksgiving Day was by far the lowest of all shopping days this season, with $766 million, though it did have the biggest increase of 21%.

Cyber Monday, meanwhile, kicked butt, with $1.7 billion dollars spend from desktop computers that day, and increase of 18% from $1.5 billion last year. 

(Image source: https://www.businesszone.co.uk)