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Bits Blog: How People Shopped Online This Holiday Season

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg NewsShoppers spent much more money online this year than last year, and they did a lot of their shopping on tablets like the iPad.

Little time remains for online shoppers to have gifts delivered in time for Christmas, and sales numbers for online shopping this season are arriving. The trends are clear: shoppers spent much more money online this year than last year, and they did a lot of their shopping on tablets like the iPad.

So far this holiday season, shoppers have spent $32 billion online, 15 percent more than last year, according to comScore. Last week was the heaviest online shopping week on record, and last weekend was the second-heaviest weekend. Though most sales from now to Christmas will take place in physical stores, some Web sites are still offering expedited shipping and online retailers will most likely sell another $5 billion to $6 billion in goods through the end of December, comScore said.

Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore and an e-commerce expert, called it “an outstanding season for online retailers.”

Shoppers are much more eager to use their mobile devices to browse and buy this year, though the evidence shows that they are more likely to use their phones for product research and turn to their tablets or computers when they are ready to buy.

Twelve percent of online visits to retailers’ Web sites came from mobile devices, up from 5 percent a year ago, according to IBM Benchmark, which tracks e-commerce. But just 9 percent of sales came from mobile phones.

While 79 percent of shoppers use their cellphones for research, just 58 percent have made purchases on their phones, according to TechBargains.com, a deal aggregation site. Meanwhile, 75 percent have made purchases on their tablets and 94 percent on their laptops.

Holiday sales at eBags.com show this behavior in action. Of the site’s total visits, 7 percent came from tablets and 5 percent from smartphones, but 7 percent of sales came from tablets while just 2 percent came from phones.

“Shopping via tablet picks up in the evenings, indicating consumers are coming home from work and turning on their iPads and shopping as they watch TV,” said Peter Cobb, co-founder and senior vice president of eBags.

But when deals hang in the balance and computers aren’t nearby, people are more than willing to turn to their phones and type their shipping address and credit card number on the tiny keyboard. Mobile commerce peaked at 10 p.m. on Cyber Monday, accounting for 20 percent of all retail traffic in the last two hours before online deals expired, according to Akamai, an Internet content delivery company.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3a07f7c7b57d8476fa5b940137aa9d85

Bits: Google’s Chrome Laptops on Sale in June

Jonathan Fickies/Bloomberg NewsSelling Chromebooks is Google’s biggest push yet into taking on Microsoft’s and Apple’s operating systems.

Google’s long-awaited Chromebooks, laptops running the Chrome operating system that stores everything online, will go on sale in June, Google said at its I/O developers conference Wednesday.

The laptops, made by Acer and Samsung, will start at $349 at Amazon.com and BestBuy.com. The computers, along with the software and technical support, will also be available to rent for schools and businesses, for $20 a month a student or $28 a month for each employee.

The Chrome operating system does away with desktop software and storing data on a computer. Instead, it is not much more than a browser, and all of a computer user’s information, like documents, photos and e-mail messages, is stored on the Internet, or in the cloud. The idea, if the Chrome operating system becomes mainstream, is that anyone could walk up to an Internet-connected computer anywhere and access their information.

“We’re venturing into a really new model of computing that I don’t think was possible previously, even a few years ago,” said Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, in a conversation with reporters. “I think it’s just a much easier way to compute.”

But in a world where most computer users are accustomed to using desktop software like Apple’s iPhoto or Microsoft Word, and storing data like photos and documents on a computer’s hard drive, it might be hard to convince them to adopt a very different model of computing.

That is one reason Google is going the route of businesses and schools. If students get used to a Web-based operating system, they might request it in their office later on, and if people use it at work, they might decide to buy one for their homes.

Selling Chromebooks is Google’s biggest push yet into taking on Microsoft’s and Apple’s operating systems. Half of businesses are still running the 2001 version of Windows XP, said Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome. Google automatically updates the Chrome operating system over the Internet.

“It’s software and hardware as a service,” Mr. Pichai said.

Google is also competing in the software business, because instead of using the desktop version of Microsoft Word, as most people do in offices and schools, Chrome users would use Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365, both of which are Web-based. They would also use other Web-based products instead of the desktop software versions, like Gmail for e-mail and Picasa for photos.

Google introduced the Chrome operating system in 2009 and showed an example of a laptop in December, but this is the first time the laptops will be widely available.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4d0dcbc21a5f03054628dc02121a7519

Bits Blog: How People Shopped Online This Holiday Season

Bits: Google’s Chrome Laptops on Sale in June

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