iOS Outpaces Android This Holiday Season

Thank IBM for compiling a wealth of quality data over the holiday season.

The company published a series of reports detailing consumer shopping habits over this year’s holiday season that started on Thanksgiving.

The latest numbers prove what companies already know: You have to go where your customers are -- and with increasing frequency, they’re on mobile devices.

According to the report, sales on Christmas Day were up 16.5 percent year over year and mobile devices accounted for 48 percent of all online traffic representing a 28.3 percent increase year over year. Mobile sales were up 40 percent year over year and account for 29 percent of sales.

Looking at just mobile, it was smartphones that accounted for 28.5 percent of all online traffic compared to the 18.1 percent share from tablets but tablets drove sales. According to IBM, tablets were responsible for 19.4 percent of all online sales—twice as much as smartphones at 9.3 percent.

Related: Amazon Reports Record Holiday Numbers

Even the average order was higher. Smartphone users spent an average of $85.11 per order while tablet users rang the virtual register for $95.61.

The headline statistic is the Apple AAPL iOS vs. Google GOOG Android numbers.

IBM found that iOS users were responsible for five times more of the total online sales than Android users. iOS devices drove 23 percent of sales while Android users were responsible for about 4.6 percent. Further, iOS users spent an average of $93.94 per order—almost twice the amount of Android users who spent $48.10. Finally, although iOS doesn’t lead in overall market share, it accounted for 32.6 percent of online traffic compared to 14.8 percent for Android.

The report also found that social media, mainly Pinterest and Facebook, played a big part in online sales this year.

Shoppers coming from Facebook spend $72.01 per order while customers from Pinterest drove $86.83 per order. Before crowning Pinterest the winner however, IBM found that Facebook referrals converted sales four times more often than Pinterest referrals.

The takeaway from this report appears to be that while Apple has a lower market share in the smartphone wars, its customers are more valuable to businesses but even more important, mobile has to be the focus of 2014 as people move away from the traditional computer and onto mobile devices at a dizzying pace.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Tim Parker was long Apple.