iOS Responsible for 75 Percent of Holiday Sales

When determining the capability of Apple Pay, a starting point could be to look at how often iOS phones are used for shopping purchases. According to data compiled by eMarketer, not only is mobile commerce doing better than a year before, iOS phones and devices, especially the iPad, are reaping the lion’s share of the m-commerce market.

In a data summary published by eMarketer, with figures provided by Adobe Digital Index and IBM, 75 percent of the recent holiday m-commerce sales were on iOS devices, with 48 percent of total sales coming from iPad. By comparison, Android tablets made up only 6 percent of sales during that time period. This helped make the majority of Thanksgiving weekend sales appear on mobile devices, where tablets are seen as the best devices for shopping according to the composite data.

Yet at the same time, it appears the m-commerce is increasingly being supported by smartphones as well. Half of m-commerce sales during the 2014 holiday shopping season were on smartphones, up from only a third in 2013. The reason, according to eMarketer, is primarily due to the larger screens current smartphones have. Also, one area that smartphones had an advantage over tablets was in m-commerce traffic. According to IBM’s 2014 online holiday shopping report, smartphones drove 31.2 percent of commerce traffic compared to 13.4 percent on tablets. Tablets still maintained an advantage in sales (13.4 percent to 9.1 percent), conversion rate (3.5 percent to 1.2 percent), average page views (7.5 to 5.9), and average order value ($112.70 to $99.30).

Despite the increasing prevalence of tablets and smartphones in online commerce, consumers still largely go with desktop computers for their shopping, which was responsible for the majority of sales (77.3 percent), and traffic (54.8 percent), as well as higher average order value ($125.10) and the highest average page views (7.7).