Recent estimates from IBM found continued growth in the online sales volume for Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year with the biggest growth coming from the mobile channel and more mobile activity overall on Black Friday.
IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark Reports for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2013 found that online sales respectively increased 19 percent and 20.6 percent from 2012. For each of these major U.S. online shopping days mobile traffic increased considerably as well. The largest increase in mobile traffic came on Cyber Monday growing by 45 percent from 2012 to 2013 with mobile comprising nearly 32% of all online traffic. But the mobile volume is largest overall on Black Friday when almost 40% of all online traffic was from mobile devices this year, a 34 percent increase from 2012.
Mobile sales for both days each increased by a significant amount in 2013 as well. Mobile sales made up more than 17 percent of total online sales on Cyber Monday, an increase of over 55 percent from 2012, while mobile sales on Black Friday increased by 43 percent to nearly 21.8 percent of total online sales. In terms of the total online sales volume Cyber Monday exceeded Black Friday by more than 30 percent, but both mobile sales and traffic were higher on Black Friday. Consumers were more likely to shop online from a computer on Cyber Monday as mobile traffic was down 20 percent and mobile sales were down 21 percent from Black Friday.
The report and data also found some interesting differences between smartphone and tablet users, as well as iOS and Android users. On both Black Friday and Cyber Monday smartphones drove more online traffic (24.9 and 19.7 percent) than tablets (14.2 and 11.5 percent), but tablets were responsible for a higher percentage of online sales (14.4 and 11.7 percent) than smartphones (7.2 and 5.5 percent). Not only are consumers more likely to browse on smartphones but purchase on tablets, tablet purchasers spent more per transaction on average than smartphone users. Apple iOS users also spent more per transaction on average for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday compared to Android users with an average order difference of about twenty dollars. Apple iOS devices additionally compromised a greater share of total online traffic and total online sales by at least twice as much than Android users on both days.
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