This summer in America mobile phones for the first time surpassed desktop and laptop PCs as the most common devices used for online retail purchases. So it is little surprise that the 2013 holiday season is shaping up to be the first “mobile Christmas,” with numerous signs that what ends up below the Christmas tree is likely to have been bought via a mobile phone or tablet.

• According to research from Adobe, online sales on “Cyber Monday” – the first Monday after the traditional start of the holiday shopping season in the US on “Black Friday” – jumped by 16% to more than $2 billion, with a record 18.3% of sales coming from mobile devices, a jump of over 80% from the same day in 2012.
• More impressively, the company is forecasting that based on current trends mobile sales in Europe will meet or surpass those of the US during the 2014 holiday season – a trend that led Adobe to call 2013 “the year of mobile for Europe.”
• Meanwhile, according to Adobe, UK customers are set to make more than 20% of their online purchases this Christmas using a mobile device, a figure larger than in either the US or Europe as a whole. In just December, UK shoppers are expected to spend £2.9 billion on retail sites using mobile devices, a number double that of a year ago.
• According to IBM, traffic from mobile devices represented nearly 30% of all online traffic on Black Friday in the US, up from just 4% three years ago.
• America’s National Retail Federation forecasts that 76% of all smartphone owners – and 88% of smartphone owners of the younger “millennial” generation – are expected to use mobile devices to buy Christmas presents this year.
• Leading US retailer Walmart launched a major holiday campaign on Facebook’s mobile platform to encourage downloads of its mobile app, and saw traffic growth from the app during the five days from days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday more than double compared to 2012.
• Walmart competitor Target built its entire holiday campaign around a hashtag – #MyKindofHoliday – that it noticed had gained popularity on Twitter.
• A Cyber Monday offering of a $25 credit on a $75 purchase at Amazon through the American Express sync program was redeemed by hundreds of thousands of users within two days, and the hashtag #AmexAmazon was tweeted about 65,000 times in half a day.
• British department store John Lewis said it was preparing for its first “mobile Christmas” having found that more than 40% of its web traffic now comes from mobile phones or tablets.
• Braintree, the US credit card payment processing firm recently acquired by eBay, said that on Cyber Monday it had processed $16.6 million in phone and tablet transactions, 164% more than in 2012 and its biggest day ever. The figures led company CEO Bill Ready to say that the surging figures are a sign of pent-up demand from consumers who want to use their phones as purchasing tools.
• According to eBay, the number of mobile shoppers on its site during the “Cyber Five” period (the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday) more than doubled compared to 2012, with the volume of transactions completed using mobile devices rising by a similar amount.
• Finally, last week leading international mobile operator T-Mobile announced that it was dropping the upfront price for iPhones to $0 in the US, meaning a wave of new smartphone owners will come on the market with plenty of time before Christmas to log on and hit “buy.”

And with that, everyone at Cellum wishes you the best for the holidays – and a very mobile New Year!