For The First Time Ever, Mobile Is Dominating The Online Shopping Season

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, for the first time ever, more people used mobile devices than PCs to browse the online shops, according to IBM.

On Thanksgiving weekend, 52% of traffic to ecommerce sites came from mobile devices, a 22 percent jump from 2013, according to IBM's Digital Analytics Benchmark survey. However, people were mostly only looking at the deals on their devices.

When it came to making a sale, mobile devices accounted for 32% percent of transactions tracked by IBM. That means that 68% of sales were still taking place on PCs.

Specifically, smartphones were used 36% of the time to browse but accounted for only 14% of total online sales. Tablets were used 15% of the time to browse but accounted for almost 18% of online sales.

That's mostly because shopping is still a pretty miserable experience on a smartphone, writes Jay Henderson, Strategy Director, IBM Smarter Commerce, "Many companies struggle with delivering a seamless mobile browse-to-buy experience."

As people increasingly use smartphones to shop, we expect ecommerce sites to start doing a better job catering to buying, not just browsing. Maybe by 2015?