Mobile commerce sales broke records on Thanksgiving Day

According to the real time analytics that were recorded by IBM, this year’s shopping trends greatly beat out 2013.

On Thanksgiving Day, the unofficial start to the holiday shopping season, family members assembled to enjoy each other’s company, to watch football, to eat a wonderful feast, but when it was all over, they looked to mobile commerce to look for great deals.

The real time analytics from IBM for Thanksgiving Day showed online sales spiked 14.3 percent over the same day last year.

Mobile traffic made up a massive 52.1 percent of all online traffic on Thanksgiving Day, this year. This means that the figure rose by 22.4 percent when compared to that same day in 2013. When looking more specifically at the shopping side of mobile commerce, IBM found that of all online sales, those made over smartphones and tablets accounted for 32.3 percent. This was higher than last year’s figure by more than a quarter, as it represented an increase of 25.4 percent.

This success in mobile commerce on that day was explained by a number of different factors.

Those contributors included the following:

• Consumers were eager to discover great online bargains, even when the stores were closed. The average order value (AOV) was 1.8 percent lower than it was last year, at $125.25. That said, those shoppers were buying an average of 4.3 items per order, which was an increase of 16.2 percent. This suggests that people were actually buying more, but they have become more savvy when it comes to finding ways to save such as through the use of online rebates and coupons.
• Smartphones were being used to browse for products, but mobile purchases were made over tablets and many still looked to their laptops and desktops. Smartphones may have driven 36.4 percent of the total online traffic (over double that of tablets, which represented 15.4 percent of online traffic), but sales over tablets made up 17.9 percent of the total and smartphones made up only 14.4 percent of the total. Desktops still reigned supreme over mobile commerce at 67.6 percent of the online sales total.