Online Sales Rise 12% on Thanksgiving Day
ThinkstockThanksgiving 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…
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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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Paul Ausick has been writing for 247Wallst.com for more than a decade. He has written extensively on investing in the energy, defense, and technology sectors. In a previous life, he wrote technical documentation and managed a marketing communications group in Silicon Valley.
He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Chicago and now lives in Montana, where he fishes for trout in the summer and stays inside during the winter.
