IBM: iOS crushed Android in Christmas shopping with 5 times the sales

Apple's iPhone and iPad represented the vast majority of U.S. online shopping and sales during Christmas, accounting for more than an 83 percent take of sales compared to Android.

Despite having minority market share in the U.S., Apple's iOS is being used to do the most mobile shopping and placing the most sales by a wide margin, according to IBM's Digital Analytics Benchmark Hub.

The has group tracked similar numbers since the holiday shopping season kicked off during Black Friday after Thanksgiving.

A series of regular reports by IBM's Digital Analytics Benchmark group, tracking a 'digital analytics platform that tracks millions of transactions and analyzes terabytes of raw data from approximately 800 retail sites nationwide,' have profiled mobile shoppers.

Online sales on Christmas Day were up 16.5 percent over last year. IBM stated that mobile devices accounted for 48 percent of all online traffic (a 28.3 percent year over year increase), while mobile sales were nearly 29 percent, an increase of over 40 percent compared to 2012.

The group noted that while smartphones drove 28.5 percent of all online traffic, leading the 18.1 percent traffic share tied to tablet devices, tablets drove 19.5 percent of all online sales, significantly larger than the 9.3 percent share of sales connected to smartphones.

Tablet users also placed higher average orders: $95.61 per order on average compared to the $85.11 average order placed via smartphone.

iOS crushes Android as shoppers' favorite platform

Breaking down those numbers by mobile platform, IBM reported that iOS devices accounted for more than 5 times the total sales of Android or over an 83 percent share of mobile-oriented sales (above), with 23 percent of all online sales occurring on an Apple mobile device versus just 4.6 percent on Android products.

IBM stated that iOS users also spent an average of twice as much more per order: an average sale of$93.94 versus an average order of just $48.10 on Android devices.

Apple's iOS devices also made up 32.6 percent of all overall mobile traffic, compared to just 14.8 percent for Android. Microsoft's Windows Phone, BlackBerry and other mobile platforms didn't represent enough activity to mention.

The leading share of online shopping grabbed by iOS users parallels the 84 percent share of tablets claimed by iPad in Chitika's web analytics, the leading share taken by iOS in app developer's revenue seen per download, and the over 80 percent usage stats reported among education and enterprise users.