E-commerce spend up 17.8% on Thanksgiving

Faith Merino · November 23, 2012 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/2bef

28.5% of retail traffic comes from mobile devices

One of the great things about mobile shopping is that you can do it anywhere—like under the table during Thanksgiving dinner.  Of course, you’re not fooling anyone by keeping the phone under the table and out of eyeshot.  Everyone knows that you’re not staring into your lap because you’re thinking really hard.

Data from IBM’s Smarter Commerce division shows that there were a lot of Thanksgiving shoppers this year.  All told, e-commerce spending on Thanksgiving was up a full 17.8% compared to last year, and mobile played a huge part in that.  Of the total Web traffic to retailers’ sites, nearly one-third (28.5%) came from mobile devices.  By comparison, mobile only accounted for 16.2% of traffic on Thanksgiving last year.

Consumers who shopped from mobile devices accounted for 15.4% of all online purchases.  This makes sense, given the fact that nearly half of all U.S. adults now own smartphones, and four out of five smartphone owners have used their device to shop, according to comScore.

IBM reports that iPhone accounted for the most mobile traffic, with 10.5% of mobile shoppers accessing retailers’ sites from the device.  Interestingly, iPad came in second, with 10.1% of mobile consumers shopping from the tablet—beating out Android devices at 7.7%.  Interesting… so Apple users are either more intense Black Friday shoppers, or they’re just more callous and dismissive of holiday family time than Android users (that’s actually not the case, though, since Android users were on their devices more during the Thanksgiving holiday last year than iPhone users).

Mobile users checked out an average of seven Web pages, and mobile and e-commerce shoppers alike purchased an average of 3.67 items.

Interestingly, social shopping didn’t really make much of a dent, with sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest driving only 0.2% of online sales.

It’s going to be another big holiday for e-commerce.  ComScore estimates that online holiday shopping (November-December) will see a 17% increase this year for a total of $43.4 billion spent altogether.  That’s compared to $37.2 billion spent online between November and December last year.

ComScore bases its estimates on the rate of growth for online spending between 2011 and 2012.  Consumers spent $143.9 billion online between January and October 2012, compared to $124.3 billion spent online during the same period last year.

Cyber Monday should be a big deal, since the last two years have seen record-breaking Cyber Monday sales.  Last year, Cyber Monday sales reached $1.25 billion, up from $1 billion in 2010—which was the first time ever that online sales topped $1 billion in a single day.  It was also the most successful Cyber Monday in history and the first time in history that Cyber Monday was actually the heaviest online shopping day of the year.

 

Image source: nytimes.com

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