Mobile Makes Cyber Monday Gains Among U.S. Holiday Shoppers

By Kevin Woodward

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Consumers used smart phones or tablets to spend $962 million on holiday purchases across three key shopping days in the past week, further cementing the importance of these devices to retailers.

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That figure, released by Adobe Systems Inc. as part of its Adobe Digital Index, includes $543 million in online sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and $419 million on Cyber Monday, the Monday following Thanksgiving, made by consumers. Adobe says of the $543 million, 77% was from consumers using iPads.

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Adobe says 18.3% of online sales came from mobile devices on Cyber Monday, an 80% increase from last year. And on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, mobile-device sales accounted for 24% of all online sales, an increase of 118% from 2012.

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Other data back up the rising power of mobile devices in commerce. Mobile sales increased to 21.8% of all online sales on Black Friday, up 43% from the 2012 Black Friday, reports IBM Corp.’s IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark that tracked activity on approximately 800 U.S. e-commerce sites.

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For many consumers, using a smart phone or tablet is about the convenience of shopping, says Rick Oglesby, senior analyst at Boston-based Aite Group LLC, in an email.

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“Mobile commerce is popular because it\'s more convenient—you can do it anytime and anywhere, and in many cases more comfortably, such as on the couch instead of at a desk—way to shop online,” Oglesby says. “It\'s a natural result of mobile-device popularity. People who are connected to the Internet will definitely use that connection to shop.”

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Indeed, data from IBM shows that mobile traffic made up 39.7% of all online traffic on Black Friday, an increase of 34% from 2012’s Black Friday.

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“The growth is to be expected until the next time we come up with a new type of computer, and that is a bit off yet,” Oglesby says. “Merchants and payment companies simply need to be optimizing for mobile selling and buying. If they don\'t, they will lose business.”

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Overall online sales boomed over the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday. Visa Inc. says consumers spent $7.8 billion online with Visa-branded cards in that period, a 30% increase from the same period last year. Cyber Monday alone accounted for $2.6 billion, or about one-third of the five-day total.

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Adobe estimates Cyber Monday online sales totaled $2.29 billion on 2,000 U.S. e-commerce sites with Thanksgiving sales of $1.062 billion and Black Friday sales of $1.93 billion.