27 percent of Christmas shopping took place on mobile devices

A recent study from RichRelevance found mobile devices were a popular vehicle consumers used to access ecommerce sites and make holiday purchases in December.

The study showed 27 percent of online shopping trips in the U.K. occurred from a mobile device during the holiday season, growing from 23 percent at the beginning of December to 31 percent by the end of 2011. On Christmas, 43 percent of shoppers were on mobile devices, and 40 percent were shopping via mobile devices on Boxing Day. The most popular mobile devices used for online purchases were the iPad and other iOS devices, accounting for 97 percent of all online purchases from non-desktops for the month.

In addition, a similar report from IBM found 15 percent of all online retail traffic came from mobile devices in December, helping the U.K. online retail sector, which reported 5.4 percent growth in sales compared to the same month in 2010. Sales from mobile devices accounted for 12.9 percent of all online transactions, up from 4.5 percent in December 2010. This represented 186.5 percent growth.

“This Christmas shopping season has been characterised by consumers looking for deals and increasingly using their mobiles to shop online,” said Andrew Jackson-Proes, enterprise marketing management leader for U.K. & Ireland at IBM. “The report demonstrates that retailers can really benefit from Smarter Commerce initiatives by meeting their customers’ expectations for offers and service via any device.”