Holiday shoppers move toward mobile

According to the latest IBM Coremetrics Benchmark numbers, traffic to retailer Web sites from mobile devices will more than double this November, with 15 percent of people who log on to such sites doing so with a mobile gadget.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor

Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.

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Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.

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Edward Moyer

Nov. 5, 2011 1:22 p.m. PT

2 min read

As the holiday shopping season rears its (insert your adjective of choice here) head, a just-released study from IBM shows that mobile devices are continuing their push toward making it a post-PC world.

October numbers from IBM show that year over year the amount of people who used a mobile gadget to touch down on a retailer's site jumped from 4.2 percent to 11 percent. In the same period, total mobile sales shot up to 9.6 percent from last year's 3.4 percent

iPad users will no doubt be welcomed by online retailers in the next couple of months: IBM says site visitors on that device will make more actual purchases than visitors using other mobile gizmos. That prediction is based on the fact that conversion rates for last month were 6.8 percent on the iPad versus 3.6 percent on other mobile gadgets.

But Apple and its iOS operating system won't be the choice of every tablet- and smartphone-wielding elf. For the first time, IBM says, Android users will do just about as much mobile shopping as iPhone fanatics. (October figures again: 4 percent of mobile traffic came from iPhones, 3.5 percent from Android-based devices.)

Here are a couple of charts to get your infographics juices flowing. Oh and btw: as far as we know, it's not yet been determined whether Santa uses an iPhone or a 'droid-driven device. We'll keep you posted.

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