Smartphones lead in online traffic, but tablets lead in online sales

From the beginning of October to the end of December, smartphones were responsible for 21.3% of all online traffic, almost twice that of tablets which were responsible for 12.8%. That being said, tablets still dominated in terms of online sales, having been responsible 11.5% of all online sales, more than twice that of smartphones.

Once the news about the astronomical security breach at Target broke, arguably that stole the spotlight for the rest of the holiday season as far as shopping and e-commerce was concerned. But there were still plenty of other retailers operating business as usual, and mobile was heavily expected to play a big part this year. Being one of the leading purveyors of real-time big data analytics and results (or at least the rhetoric behind the technology), IBM has published some final figures pinpointing the dent mobile actually made.