Fifth of online commerce traffic comes from mobile in December 2012 as mobile takes bigger slice of digital Christmas, finds Affiliate Window

Nearly a fifth of m-commerce traffic and some 15% of sales are came through mobile devices in December, up from 16 and 12.3% respectively in November and more than double December 2011, as shoppers start to do more of their Christmas shopping in the UK through the channel, according to figures out this week from Affiliate Window.

While consumers are widely using mobile devices – including tablets – for pre-shopping research purposes, the number of people actually transacting through mobile has grown by 210% between December 2011 and December 2012, with nearly 2.5million transactions in 2012 compared to some 785,000 in 2011.

According to the data, conversion rates on mobile also hit a peak in December 2012, up to 4.3%, compared with 3.89% in November, which Affiliate Window attributes to increasing mobile optimisation of sites and advertising and better affiliate tracking being put in place.

The largest increase in conversion rates through 2012 has been on Blackberry, which is converting an impressive 13.19% on a much smaller volume of traffic, while iPhone and Android are pootling along at just over 1%.

But what is perhaps most interesting is that the iPad is increasingly dominating mobile device based sales for the year across 2012, notching up 59% of mobile device sales. Second place, with 23%, goes to the iPhone. Android comes a poor third at just 12% of sales. iPad conversion rates are around 6%, second only to Blackberry, but on a much larger volume of traffic.