Black Friday Shoppers Go Increasingly Mobile

The Black Friday hallmark of over-caffeinated shoppers running hell bent into Target at 4am is shifting further towards a tamer approach: sitting on the couch and shopping on your smartphone or tablet.

Mobile shopping accounted for well over a third of all online shopping on Black Friday 2015 in the U.S., some 36.1% according to e-commerce analytics firm Custora.

That’s up from 30.3% last year. Keeping with the longstanding trend for mobile commerce, the vast majority of those mobile customers were also iPhone users.

Some 77 .6% of all orders made on mobile devices took place on iPhones or iPads, while only 22.1% took place on Android devices. The good news for Android is that its share of the pie is up slightly from 19.5% of orders last year.

Still, it’s an ongoing pain point for Google that Apple ’s mobile devices are far more likely to be used for buying goods and services, even though Android has a dominant global market share for smartphone platforms. As FORBES contributor Ayo Omojola has pointed out, “iOS is for selling product, and Android is for advertising.”

The shift to online shopping from bricks and mortar on Black Friday is a long-standing phenomenon, though one that has been more recently making the shift specifically to mobile shopping.

In retail stores, sales on Black Friday dropped to $10.4 billion this year from $11.6 billion last year, according to shopping analytics firm ShopperTrack.

Many people still question the ongoing relevance of Black Friday, says ShopperTrack’s chief revenue officer, Kevin Kearns, but “it is still the biggest sales day of the year, and signals the start of the holiday shopping season.”