According to IBM, US shoppers once again took advantage of early promotions this holiday season, driving a 17.4% increase in online sales Thanksgiving Day. This increase set the stage for 20.7%growth on Black Friday. The biggest surge came from mobile consumers, with sales reaching 16.3%, led by the iPad. This data is the result of cloud-based analytics findings from IBM.
As part of IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark revealed the following trends:
° Mobile purchases soared with 24% of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 14.3% in 2011. Mobile sales exceeded 16%, up from 9.8% in 2011.
° The iPad generated more traffic than any other tablet or smartphone, reaching nearly 10% of online shopping. This was followed by the iPhone at 8.7% and the Android 5.5% The iPad dominated tablet traffic at 88.3% followed by the Barnes and Noble Nook at 3.1%, the Amazon Kindle at 2.4% and the Samsung Galaxy at 1.8%.
° Consumers shopped in store, online and on mobile devices simultaneously to get the best bargains. Overall 58% of consumers used smartphones compared to 41% who used tablets to surf for bargains on Black Friday.
° While consumers spent more overall, they shopped with greater frequency to take advantage of retailer deals and free shipping. This led to a drop in average order value by 4.7% to $181.22. In addition, the average number of items per order decreased 12% to 5.6.
This info is based on findings from the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, a cloud-based Web analytics platform that tracks more than a million e-commerce transactions a day, analyzing terabytes of raw data from 500 retailers nationwide. More info can be found at www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_commerce/overview/ .