Online Holiday Shopping Was Dominated By Smartphones, iOS

It was certainly a very merry Christmas for online shopping, which grew 16.5 percent over last year thanks in great part to smartphone browsing and iOS sales.
Mobile traffic reached its highest-ever peak during the holiday season, accounting for 48 percent of all online traffic—up 28.3 percent from 2012, according to the annual IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark.
A large part of that browsing was conducted on smartphones, which drove 28.5 percent of all online traffic, while shoppers used tablets for 18.1 percent of the traffic generated during the holiday season, according to the IBM report. When it came to actually going to checkout with a purchase, though, tablets were king with 19.4 percent of all online sales made via slates, while smartphone users generated 9.3 percent.
Tablet users were also more likely to spend more, averaging $95.61 per order, whereas smartphone users usually spent around $85.11, IBM reported.

Online shopping proclivities don't end at just the type of device—Apple fans tend to spend more on their mobile devices and it turns out they drop more coin when shopping online as well. According to IBM, online holiday season sales were five times more likely to be settled on Apple gadgets than Android-based devices. Apple's iOS mobile operating system was the platform used for 23 percent of online purchases during the holidays, as users of Google's Android OS drove just 4.6 percent.
"On average, iOS users spent $93.94 per order, nearly twice that of Android users, who spent $48.10 per order," IBM said. Apple's iOS also led overall traffic on e-tail sites, driving 32.6 percent versus Android's 14.8 percent.
And it turns out that as annoying as users find advertisements on social media, they are pretty darn effective. IBM reported that shoppers referred from Facebook averaged $72.01 per order with their purchases. Pinterest-referred shoppers averaged even more, at $86.83 per order.
"However, Facebook referrals converted sales at nearly four times the rate of Pinterest referrals, perhaps indicating stronger confidence in network recommendations," IBM's research team said.
The IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, which tracks millions of transactions and analyzes terabytes of raw data from 800 nationwide retail sites, boasts the title of the industry's only real-time, cloud-based digital analytics platform.