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Apple iOS Drives More Cyber Monday Online Sales Than Android

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As a nation, we love to shop. We love bargains. That’s why we go nuts for Black Friday deals. Technology is constantly changing how and where we shop, of course, with mobile devices leading the way. This year, according to IBM , online sales went up almost 20 percent on Thanksgiving Day. And Apple users drove a ton of it -- as a percentage of total online sales; iOS was close to four and a half times higher than Android.

  • iOS drove 12.8 percent of online sales vs. 2.8 percent for Android
  • On average, iOS users spent $122.82 per order compared to $114.24 for Android users
  • iOS also led as a component of overall traffic with 20.3 percent vs. 8.9 percent for Android

The biggest sales surge came from mobile users which reached 25.8 percent of total online sales for Thanksgiving and 21.8 percent for Black Friday, as plenty of consumers went from dinner table to tablet to lock in the best offers.  In addition, IBM reported that New York City consumers led the way in Black Friday online sales followed by Atlanta and Los Angeles.

This is the fifth year in a row that IBM has put out these Benchmark alerts around online holiday shopping, but they also put the Retail Index Reports at other times throughout the year. Overall, Cyber Monday online sales are up 17.5 percent in 2013 over the same period last year.

Here are some of the other key drivers:

Mobile Traffic and Sales:  Mobile traffic accounted for 29.4 percent of all online traffic, up more than 61 percent compared to the same period last year.  Mobile sales remained strong, reaching 15.6 percent of all online sales.

  • People use their smartphones to browse and then switch to their tablets to buy.
  • Smartphones drove 19.8 percent of all online traffic compared to tablets at 9.2 percent, making it the browsing device of choice.
  • When it comes to making the sale, tablets drove 9.6 percent of all online sales, more than one and a half times that of smartphones, which accounted for 5.9 percent.
  • Tablet users also averaged $129.82 per order, versus smartphone users, who averaged $112.34 per order.

Facebook vs. Pinterest

Shoppers referred from Facebook averaged $97.46 per order, versus Pinterest referrals, which drove $91.53 per order.   Facebook referrals converted sales at roughly the same rate as Pinterest referrals.

I found this very surprising as I have been working on a Pinterest report and almost universally business owners have told me their Pinterest page has converted better than Facebook. Of course, this is my limited perspective and an anecdotal study, not scientific at all, really. I put out a request for Pinterest success stories and got a flood of them. I’m open to hear about Facebook, too, and you can tweet them to me (icon below right) or via my TechBizTalk blog where I link to case study requests.

If you track online and traditional retail, you may appreciate these updates from the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, a real-time, cloud-based digital analytics platform that tracks millions of transactions and analyzes terabytes of raw data from approximately 800 retail sites nationwide. I’m on their email update list, but you can visit the IBM Benchmark site for real-time data alerts, or follow the hashtag #SmarterCommerce on Twitter.