Apple Devices Dominate Mobile Online Shopping

The holiday season came a little early for Apple this year, but it’s not as if the company didn’t already know what it was getting. New statistics released this week from retail analysis firm RichRelevance indicate that iPads and iPhones are the top mobile devices that consumers use to make retail purchases.

By just how much, you ask? According to RichRelevance, 92 percent of all “online non-desktop sales” came from an iOS-friendly device during December. Better still (for retailers), those using their iPhones, iPads, and other iOS devices to shop online spent more, on average, than those shopping via other mobile platforms like Android: $123 for iOS devices versus $101 for Android devices. Even though desktop-based sales crushed mobile-based purchases in volume, the average order value of these purchases only reached $87.

“The numbers across our retailing partners sites demonstrate just how powerful the iOS platform is enabling mobile web shopping and, while still below 5 percent in total conversion, mobile traffic’s doubling in eight months is a trend we only see accelerating,” said David Selinger, RichRelevance CEO, in a statement.

In total, mobile device-based shopping hit around 3 percent of all online sales analyzed by RichRelevance—more than 3.4 billion sales in total, stretched across the months of April to mid-December. Translated out to raw dollars, mobile-based sales jumped from 1.87 percent of all U.S. online retail spending in April to 3.74 percent in December.

As mentioned, this news should come as little surprise to Apple, as the company has already seen snapshots of iOS mobile shopping dominance. Take, for example, Black Friday: According to IBM, the iPhone and iPad ranked first and second for consumer shopping on mobile devices on Black Friday itself (5.4 percent and 4.8 percent, with Android-based devices taking up third at 4.1 percent). That totals just over 10 percent of the mobile shopping market for Apple’s flagship products.

IBM also indicated that the specific Black Friday conversion rates for the iPad—a comparison of online visits versus purchases made—were double those of the mobile device category as a whole (4.6 percent to 2.8 percent.)

Even though Android enjoys a healthy lead in overall global market share for smartphones versus the iPhone—no doubt a result of Android’s ability to exist on multiple devices versus the single iOS smartphone product line—it seems that iOS users continue to carry the day for mobile shopping.