Mobile accounts for 1/3rd of Thanksgiving Day sales

Thanksgiving Day sales up 14%, though the average order size decreased from 2013

There was once a time, as my girlfriend's mother likes to tell us, that stores did not even open on Sunday, let alone on Thanksgiving. Those days are long past though, and what has traditionally been known as "Black Friday" has been stretched to the point where the words have ceased to have any meaning.

(For those who care: the terms means that sales would be so heavy on that single day that stores would go "in the black," meaning they were profitable, as opposed to "in the red," or unprofitable. Now you can go impress your friends!)

Case in point: pre-Thanksgiving online sales were already up 19% this year, and now we've learned that sales on Thanksgiving itself went up 14.3% year-to-year, according to data from IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark on Friday. 

Once again, mobile saw a big uptick, increasing its traffic by 22.4% to actually become the majority this year, with 52.1%. Mobile's percentage of sales rose to 32.3%, a 25.4% increase year-to-year. Overall, 36.4% of that traffic came from smartphones, while only 15.4% came from tablets. Tablets, however, saw a higher percentage of online sales, 17.9% to 14.4%. That is a 24.2% difference.

Mobile sales and traffic have been increasing rapidly in the last few years. In 2011 mobile devices accounted for amere 9.8% of online sales, up from 3.2% in 2010. Mobile sales reached 16% in 2012, and then 21.8% in 2013. Meanwhile traffic went from to 5.6%in 2010, to 14.3 in 2011%, 24% in 2012, and 39.7% in 2013.

Those numbers are similar to the pre-Thanksgiving sales, and here is what I said about them then: 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.

And, again, the  desktop still dominates. As much as people love to say that the personal computer is dead, that thing just keeps on ticking, as PC traffic still had 47.6% of all online traffic, and the vast majorty of sales, with 67.6%. The desktop also kicked butt when it came to average order value:  $132.48, compared to $112.69 on mobile, a difference of 17.6%. 

The dominant mobile platform for the day was iOS, beating out Android in every category. Online traffic was 35.7%, compared to 15.9% on Android; percentage of sales was 25.2%, compared to a mere 6.9%; and average order value was $118.57 per order, compared to $95.25, a 24.5% difference.

And, when it came to social media, Facebook won out, driving an average of $107.73 per order, while Pinterest referrals averaged $95.24 per order.

The news was not all good, though: the average order this year continued to drop.

The average order for pre-Thanksgiving sales slid down 5.4% year to year, to $112.86. The fall for sales on Thanksgiving was not quite as steep, but they did drop 1.8% to $125.25 down, though they also purchased an average of 4.3 items per order, an increase of 16.2 percent.

Overall, things are looking pretty good this year, so I guess we should brace ourselves for another massive Black Friday.

(Image source: wallstreetinsanity.com)