The onward march of ecommerce

This Christmas, 48% of all online traffic was from mobile phones and tablets – an increase of over 28% on last year. Breaking that down further, the split between phones and tablets was 28% and 18% respectively.

The figures, obtained from IBM's Digital Analytics Benchmark which tracks online sales, make interesting reading. Further analysis shows that whilst smartphones may have the upper hand when consumers are shopping online, they're still shying away from them when it comes to making their final purchase. Only 9% of purchases were made by smartphone, against 19% by tablet – more than double.

Retailers, whether they're running PPC accounts or not, need to take serious consideration of these stats. The growth in online and mobile retail isn't slowing down – quite the opposite. Over the next few years it's going to dominate the retail world even more than it is already. Even that venerable retailer, John Lewis, saw a 22.6% increased share in online sales over Christmas.

So if you haven't set up an online shopping channel yet, maybe now is the time to start thing about it. And when you've done that, you're going to need to make sure it's optimised for tablets and smartphones as well. Because if your online shop doesn't work so well on mobile, you can be sure your customer is going to go elsewhere.