Savvy shoppers keep an eye peeled for bargains from about Halloween all the way until Black Friday. The week of the Thanksgiving holiday focuses attention on shopping and sales, and because everyone loves a horse race, top-selling products generate plenty of enthusiasm.
Online sales are up 21% year-over-year through Tuesday, according to IBM’s Watson data analytics program. Here are a few key trends for online sales this year:
- The fastest trending products include Sony Xperia Tablets, Lego Ninjago, Nintendo 3DS XL, Schleich Toy Pets and Acer Aspire Laptops.
- Consumers are spending more. The average order value for mobile and desktop shoppers on Tuesday was $135.20, up almost $6.00 from Monday and up by $5.37 from the same day in 2014.
- Mobile traffic accounted for 48% of all online traffic on Tuesday, up 18.5% from a year ago. Mobile sales rose by more than 36% to account for 26.5% of all online sales yesterday.
- Mobile shoppers are spending $12.35 more per order than they did a year ago, with the average order up nearly 11% to $125.69. Desktop shoppers had the highest average order value at $144.38.
- Smartphones dominate mobile devices used for shopping, accounting for 37.2% of all online traffic compared with 10.8% of traffic attributed to tablets. Smartphones also drove 14.1% of sales compared with 12.4% from tablets.
We noted earlier today that IBM’s Watson figured Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone sales to rise 3% year-over-year for the holiday quarter to 76.5 million units and Watch sales to rise to 6 million units. Perhaps amazingly, the Watch was the hottest gift of the season, topping a Star Wars robot and a talking Barbie doll. Consumers seem to have ignored analysts and reviewers who have been lukewarm in their reception of the Watch.
The deals that have surfaced earlier this week have surely been driving more traffic to online sales sites. The question, of course, is whether or not these sales are simply replacing sales that would have been made later or if they are incremental to at least some degree.
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