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Mobile shopping doubles over December

By Shan Li
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People increasingly turned to mobile shopping over the holidays. And they didn’t just browse, they bought.

Sales over mobile devices during December doubled from the same month in 2010, according to a survey from IBM. About 11% of total online sales in that month were on smartphones and tablet computers, up from 5.5% a year earlier.

That tracks with growth in overall online spending, which rose 7.5% in December compared to the same period a year ago, following double-digit growth over Black Friday and Cyber Monday in November.

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During 2011, online payment service PayPal alone handled $4 billion in mobile payments, a huge bump from the $750 million the company processed in 2010, David Marcus, PayPal’s vice president of mobile, told Bloomberg.

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Shan Li

Shan Li covered the retail and restaurant industries for the Los Angeles Times. She previously reported on the California economy and the technology sector. A Texas native, she graduated from the business school at New York University, where she decided journalism was much more interesting than a job on Wall Street. She left The Times in 2017.

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