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IBM Reports Record Online Shopping for Thanksgiving and Black Friday

IBM reported a 19.7 percent increase in Thanksgiving Day online sales as holiday shoppers once again went online for the best deals.

This momentum set the stage for a record Black Friday with online sales growing 18.9 percent over the same period last year. This data is the result of cloud-based analytics from IBM.

The biggest surge came from mobile sales which reached 25.8 percent of total online sales for Thanksgiving, and 21.8 percent for Black Friday, as consumers went from the dinner table to their tablets to lock in the best offers.

Delivered by the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, this year’s holiday report tracked millions of transactions and terabytes of data from approximately 800 US retail websites.

The company released the following trends:

· Online Sales Set New Record: Thanksgiving Day online sales grew 19.7 percent year-over-year followed by Black Friday, with sales increasing 19 percent over 2012. Average order value for Black Friday was $135.27, up 2.2 percent year-over-year.

· Mobile Shopping Soars: Mobile traffic grew to 39.7 percent of all online traffic, an increase of 34 percent over Black Friday 2012. Mobile sales were also strong, reaching 21.8 percent of total online sales, an increase of nearly 43 percent year-over-year.

· Smartphones Browse, Tablets Buy: Smartphones drove 24.9 percent of all online traffic on Black Friday compared to tablets at 14.2 percent, making it the browsing device of choice. Tablets drove 14.4 percent of all online sales, double that of smartphones, which accounted for 7.2 percent of all online sales. On average, tablet users spent $132.75 per order compared to smartphone users who spent $115.63, a difference of 15 percent.

· iOS vs. Android: On average, iOS users spent $127.92 per order on Black Friday compared to $105.20 per order for Android users. iOS traffic reached 28.2 percent of all online traffic, compared to 11.4 percent for Android. iOS sales reached 18.1 percent of all online sales, compared to 3.5 percent for Android.

· Retailers “Push” Promotions to Mobile Shoppers: On average, retailers sent 37 percent more push notifications – the alert messages and popup notifications from apps installed on your mobile device – during the two day period over Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday when compared to daily averages over the past two months. Average daily retail app installations also grew by 23 percent using the same comparison. Retailers sent more notifications on Thanksgiving Day than Black Friday.

· The Social Influence – Facebook vs. Pinterest: On average, holiday shoppers referred from Pinterest on Black Friday spent 77 percent more per order than shoppers referred from Facebook. Facebook average order value was $52.30 versus Pinterest average order value which was $92.51. However, Facebook referrals converted sales at nearly four times the rate of Pinterest.

“We’re off to an incredibly fast start this holiday season as retailers and consumers meet at the intersection of cloud, mobile and social platforms to both offer and take advantage of the best deals,” said Jay Henderson, Strategy Director, IBM Smarter Commerce. “It’s clear that marketers are using cloud analytics technologies like the IBM Benchmark to better understand and act on real-time shopping trends. This year’s winners will be those that can deliver seamless experiences to consumers wherever, whenever and however they choose to shop.”

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IBM Reports Record Online Shopping for Thanksgiving and Black Friday

IBM reported a 19.7 percent increase in Thanksgiving Day online sales as holiday shoppers once again went online for the best deals.

This momentum set the stage for a record Black Friday with online sales growing 18.9 percent over the same period last year. This data is the result of cloud-based analytics from IBM.

The biggest surge came from mobile sales which reached 25.8 percent of total online sales for Thanksgiving, and 21.8 percent for Black Friday, as consumers went from the dinner table to their tablets to lock in the best offers.

Delivered by the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, this year’s holiday report tracked millions of transactions and terabytes of data from approximately 800 US retail websites.

The company released the following trends:

· Online Sales Set New Record: Thanksgiving Day online sales grew 19.7 percent year-over-year followed by Black Friday, with sales increasing 19 percent over 2012. Average order value for Black Friday was $135.27, up 2.2 percent year-over-year.

· Mobile Shopping Soars: Mobile traffic grew to 39.7 percent of all online traffic, an increase of 34 percent over Black Friday 2012. Mobile sales were also strong, reaching 21.8 percent of total online sales, an increase of nearly 43 percent year-over-year.

· Smartphones Browse, Tablets Buy: Smartphones drove 24.9 percent of all online traffic on Black Friday compared to tablets at 14.2 percent, making it the browsing device of choice. Tablets drove 14.4 percent of all online sales, double that of smartphones, which accounted for 7.2 percent of all online sales. On average, tablet users spent $132.75 per order compared to smartphone users who spent $115.63, a difference of 15 percent.

· iOS vs. Android: On average, iOS users spent $127.92 per order on Black Friday compared to $105.20 per order for Android users. iOS traffic reached 28.2 percent of all online traffic, compared to 11.4 percent for Android. iOS sales reached 18.1 percent of all online sales, compared to 3.5 percent for Android.

· Retailers “Push” Promotions to Mobile Shoppers: On average, retailers sent 37 percent more push notifications – the alert messages and popup notifications from apps installed on your mobile device – during the two day period over Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday when compared to daily averages over the past two months. Average daily retail app installations also grew by 23 percent using the same comparison. Retailers sent more notifications on Thanksgiving Day than Black Friday.

· The Social Influence – Facebook vs. Pinterest: On average, holiday shoppers referred from Pinterest on Black Friday spent 77 percent more per order than shoppers referred from Facebook. Facebook average order value was $52.30 versus Pinterest average order value which was $92.51. However, Facebook referrals converted sales at nearly four times the rate of Pinterest.

“We’re off to an incredibly fast start this holiday season as retailers and consumers meet at the intersection of cloud, mobile and social platforms to both offer and take advantage of the best deals,” said Jay Henderson, Strategy Director, IBM Smarter Commerce. “It’s clear that marketers are using cloud analytics technologies like the IBM Benchmark to better understand and act on real-time shopping trends. This year’s winners will be those that can deliver seamless experiences to consumers wherever, whenever and however they choose to shop.”

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...