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IBM found that online sales were up significantly for the typically busy day-after-Christmas shopping cycle this year.
Dubbed “Mega-Monday” by many retailers because Dec. 26 fell on Monday this year, IBM officials said online sales grew 27.8 percent from December 26, 2010, levels.
Moreover, mobile traffic rose significantly. IBM said 16.4 percent of all online sessions on retailers’ sites were initiated from a mobile device, up from 7.8 percent on this day in 2010-an increase of 109.3 percent. Indeed, sales from mobile devices grew 164.9 percent from the same period in 2010-from 4.3 percent in 2010 for Dec. 26, 2010, to 11.3 percent in 2011.
In addition, IBM said the iPad led all mobile-device traffic, at 6 percent on Dec. 26, 2011, followed by iPhone, at 5.8 percent, and Android, at 4.6 percent.
IBM gets its online sales figures as part of its online retail benchmark activities. The IBM Coremetrics Benchmark, part of the company’s Smarter Commerce strategy, collects metrics on online sales and other retail information and enables users to apply analytics to that data for purposes such as marketing and more.
The IBM Coremetrics Benchmark tracks more than 1 million transactions a day, analyzing terabytes of raw, real-time data from 500 retailers nationwide. With this data, IBM helps retailers better understand and respond to their customers-across the organization-improving sourcing, inventory management, marketing, sales and services programs.
Meanwhile, IBM also reported that online commerce for Christmas Day was up. Online sales were 16.4 percent higher than on Christmas Day 2010, IBM said. And 18.3 percent of all online sessions on retailers’ sites were initiated from a mobile device, up from 8.4 percent on Christmas Day 2010-an increase of 117.8 percent. Also, sales from mobile devices reached 14.4 percent, compared with 5.3 percent on Christmas Day 2010-an increase of 172.9 percent. And the iPad led all Christmas Day 2011 mobile-device traffic at 7 percent, followed by iPhone at 6.4 percent and Android at 5 percent, IBM said.
The so-called “Mega-Monday” was slated to be one of the busiest shopping days of the year, as retailers offered various sales for shoppers looking for deals and others returning gifts.
IBM’s Christmastime online sales figures follow the company’s benchmark results for Black Friday and Cyber-Monday, which showed strong online sales on Thanksgiving leading to strong sales for Black Friday and Cyber-Monday.