Revenues from online shopping on "Cyber Monday" surged 15.4 percent higher than last year, setting a new all time peak in U.S. ecommerce, with online mobile sales overwhelmingly driven by customers wielding Apple devices.
Analytics firm Custora reported record setting online sales volumes spanning the holiday weekend from Thanksgiving to Black Friday through Cyber Monday, with orders and revenues both up by more than 15 percent over last year.
Mobile phones and tablets accounted for 21.9 percent of online orders on Monday, a major increase over last year's 15.9 percent mobile proportion. On Black Friday, the firm said the mobile devices made up an even greater 30.3 percent of orders.
"The vast majority of mobile shopping happened on Apple devices over the weekend - 78%," the firm noted, "while only 21.6% happened on Android devices."
Those numbers are in line with the non-holiday figures Custora reported this summer, which similarly outlined that 78 percent of all mobile orders came from Apple's iOS, while 22 percent had come from Android products.
Holiday sales driven by spam more than Google paid search or social networks
Cyber Monday sales were driven by spam email marketing, which overtook Google search ads and organic search, the firm reported. "The vast majority of mobile shopping happened on Apple devices over the weekend - 78%" - Custora
Email spam drove 27.3 percent of Black Friday sales and 23.9 percent of orders on Monday, compared to less than 19 percent of sales following Google's paid search results or originating from unpaid "organic" Google search results.
Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, "was not a meaningful channel during the holiday weekend" for driving online orders Custora reported, collectively accounting for less than 2 percent of online orders over the important shopping weekend.
Mobile buyers' overwhelming preference of iOS holds steady in 2014
In July, Custora detailed that Apple's share of online orders originating from smartphones has only increased since Samsung's 2012 introduction of the Galaxy S3 (above), and that the rest of the smartphone market, including the rest of Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows Phone platforms, has seen its collective share of phone orders fall to below 16 percent.
In tablets, Apple's iPad maintained an even larger lead (above). Samsung tablets represented just 12 percent of orders, while Amazon Kindle Fire tablets represented just over 4 percent, a notable figure given that company's strategic focus that almost exclusively targets online sales.
Google's tablets get a lot of media attention, but their users only placed just over 1 percent of online orders, while tablets from everyone else (including Microsoft's Surface) amounted to less than 3 percent.