Retail

Online Sales Rise 12% on Thanksgiving Day

Online shopping
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Thanksgiving Day online shopping posted some good news and some not-so-good news. As of 6:00 p.m. ET on Thanksgiving Day, online sales are up 12.2% compared with the same period a year ago and the average order value this year is $130.39, flat with a year ago.

Mobile traffic accounted for nearly half (47.4%) of all holiday online traffic and mobile devices accounted for nearly 30% of all online sales. Both data points are up more than 26% compared with Thanksgiving Day 2013. The data is collected and reported by the Digital Analytics Benchmark group at International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM).

The IBM researchers also reported on some interesting trends:

  • Smartphones drove double the online traffic of tablets, but tablet sales were nearly 20% higher than smartphone sales.
  • Desktop PCs accounted for about 70% of all sales and the average order size from a desktop was nearly 21% higher than from a mobile device.
  • Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iOS platform accounted for more than double the amount of online traffic (32.1% vs. 14.8%) as Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android, and iOS sales were 3-times higher than Android sales.
  • Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) drove orders valued at nearly 20% more than orders referred from Pinterest.

These data points match up well with similar data collected by IBM last year: smartphone users do more browsing than buying; iPhone users both browse more and spend more than do Android users; and, perhaps most important of all, desktop PCs are far from dead.

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