Holiday-season online sales jumped 13.9 percent compared to 2013, according to a final report covering November and December from IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark.
More than a quarter of that sales volume was from mobile phones and tablets, which also represented 45 percent of the traffic to the 800 e-commerce websites that IBM monitors for its benchmark service. Mobile’s share of online traffic was up 25.5 percent, while mobile’s share of online sales increased 27.2 percent year-over-year, Chain Store Age reported.
Smartphones drove 31.2 percent of online traffic but only 9.1 percent of sales, while tablets accounted for 13.4 percent of online traffic and sales. Meanwhile, desktop PCs still ruled holiday e-commerce with 54.8 percent of online traffic and 77.3 percent of online sales volume.
Customers also spent more money on their desktops with an average order value of $125.12, 19.4 percent higher than the average mobile-device order of $104.82. Overall, average online order value was $119.33, down 8 percent from 2013. Shoppers purchased an average of four items per order.
As usual, shoppers using Apple iPhones and iPads outspent Android-using shoppers. The iOS-based shoppers averaged $110.92 per order, 27.1 percent higher than the $87.26 spent by Android users. Apple users also accounted for 30.3 percent of total online traffic, more than double that of Android with 14.3 percent of all online traffic.
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