An unprecedented 15 per cent of people in the UK browsing retail sites over the Christmas period are expected to do so through a mobile device, according to cloud analytics-based findings by IBM. Online shopping sales in November – as retailers launch earlier seasonal promotions – are expected to grow by as much as 10 per cent against November 2010.

In October, 12 per cent of people used a mobile device to log onto a retailer’s site, up from 3.7 per cent in October 2010, with 11 per cent of all online sales in October, up from 3.1 per cent in October 2010. In the UK, iPhone dominates the mobile phone market with nearly double the amount of traffic compared to Android users. Numbers show iPhone accounting for 5.5 percent of mobile traffic and Android 2.4 percent in October 2011, while the iPad yielded the highest conversion rate, of 5.5 per cent against the rate of 3.5 per cent on mobile devices.

These finding are based on the IBM Coremetrics Benchmark, which gathers real-time data directly from the sites of more than 150 UK retailers.