IBM says mobile commerce up sharply on Thanksgiving, led by Apple iPhone and Apple iPad

According to IBM, mobile shoppers are skipping the turkey, or at least putting it off for later, and instead are picking up their Apple iPhone or Apple iPad to go shopping. An early look at online sales conducted on Thanksgiving shows that sales are up 14.3% from last year with the average sale at $132.57. 26.5% of consumers shopping online are using a mobile device versus last year's figure of 15.8%. The average number of pages viewed is 7.3.

IBM's Benchmark Service surveys 500 top retailers, looking at over 1 million transactions, and if anyone has the computing capabilities to turn the raw data into something retailers can use, it is Big Blue. IBM says the most popular device for online retail shopping is the Apple iPhone, which was responsible for 9.6% of shopping traffic as of noon Thursday. Right behind Apple's iconic smartphone is its iconic tablet. 9.3% of shopping traffic came from the Apple iPad on Thursday morning. IBM puts all Android devices together in one category, which was responsible for 7.3% of shopping traffic. And instead of just browsing on retailer's site, 14.1% of consumers have been using their mobile device to make purchases this year, up 4 percentage points from 2011. 

With most stores closed in the U.S. for Thanksgiving, online shopping is the place to get an early start on tomorrow's Black Friday chaos, when  retailers traditionally take in a large percentage of their annual revenue.

source: IBM via TechCrunch