Data Monday: 2011 Holiday Shopping & Mobile

by January 2, 2012

Online commerce wrapped up 2011 by breaking records in total spending, mobile purchases, mobile device activations, and mobile app downloads. Here's what happened during the 2011 holiday season.

  • Online shopping jumped 16.4% on Christmas Day 2011 over last year, and the dollar amount of those purchases that were made using mobile devices leaped 172.9%. (source)
  • Nearly 7 percent of all online purchases were made using iPads, just 18 months after the tablet computers were released by Apple Inc. (source)
  • iPad and iPhone shoppers account for 90% of all mobile purchases; spend 19% more per order than Android users. (source)
  • On Christmas Day 2011, iOS and Android daily (new device) activations jumped to more than 6.8 million, a 353% increase over the baseline. Compared to Christmas Day 2010, the previous single-day record, with 2.8 million device activations, Christmas 2011 grew by more than 140%. (source)
  • Amazon customers purchased over 1 million Kindle devices each week of the 2011 holiday season. (source)
  • Gifting of Kindle digital books was up 175 percent between Black Friday and Christmas Day compared to the same period in 2010 and Christmas Day was the biggest day ever for Kindle book downloads. (source)
  • App download volumes increased by 125% on Christmas Day 2011. Nearly a quarter of a billion downloads occurred, which is more than double any other day in the history of iOS and Android devices, except December 24, which delivered roughly 150 million downloads. (source)
  • On an average day during the 2011 holiday season-to-date (Nov. 1 – Dec. 26), Digital Content & Subscriptions accounted for 2.8% of retail e-commerce sales, but on Christmas Day the category accounted for more than 20% of sales. (source)
  • $35.3 billion was spent online in the 2011 holiday season, marking a 15% increase versus the corresponding days last year. (source)
  • The week ending Dec. 18, led by four individual days surpassing $1 billion in sales, reached an all-time record of $6.3 billion in online retail spending (source)
  • The final shopping weekend before Christmas reached $1.04 billion to rank as the second heaviest weekend of online spending on record (source)
  • For the 2011 holiday season-to-date, ten individual days surpassed $1 billion in online retail sales. Cyber Monday (Nov. 28) currently ranks as the heaviest online spending day in history at $1.251 billion. (source)