Shopping On A Phone On A Phone,shop on a phone,shopping on smartphones and other mobile devices is showing signs

Long promised as the wave of the future, shopping on smartphones and other mobile devices is showing signs of becoming a significant business this holiday season–at least judging from the evidence that emerged Thanksgiving Day.
Fashion deals site Ruelala.com, owned by GSI Commerce, said some 19% of all that day’s sales came from mobile phones. That “crazily large number” is up tenfold from last Thanksgiving, said GSI’s senior vice president Fiona Dias. But it makes sense, she said, when loyal customers are “sitting with their phone on grandma’s couch.”
Rival Gilt.com echoed the mobile boost, noting that on Thanksgiving nearly 15% of total revenue came from mobile (not including the recently launched Gilt City business). The company, which has a popular shopping app for the iPad, says the figure on an average day is closer to 5%, or 8% on a weekend.
Giant online marketplace eBay, too, said that mobile bidding activity was up 30% at the half-way point on Black Friday versus last Friday. The company’s PayPal unit, which processes online payments across a range of sites, says it saw a four-fold increase in mobile payment volume on Thanksgiving versus last year.
It makes sense that the first sites to win mobile customers would involve an element of urgency, like flash sales and auctions. Yet there were signs that shoppers were using their phones for ordinary purchases, too.
During the first half of Black Friday, IBM’s Coremetrics, which measures activity on some 500 different e-commerce sites, says online traffic from mobile handsets doubled the rate from a week ago.
Blue Nile, the online jeweler, said that its mobile traffic for the month of November is up 1,400% from last year (when it didn’t yet have a dedicated app or mobile website). In fact, one man last week used his iPhone to make a purchase on the site that cost over $250,000. He did his research on the phone screen, which he also used to call in the final order by voice.
Much of the mobile traffic is likely comparison shopping. In downtown San Francisco on Black Friday, eBay held an event to give free lessons (and free tacos) to people to explain how to use the cameras on their smartphones and the company’s Red Laser to scan and compare prices in stores.
At nearby mall, Vivian Li, 34, and Tri Tang, 25, were doing just that with an app called Barcode Scanner on an HTC Droid Incredible smartphone. Ms. Li scanned the barcode on a $122 pair of True Religion jeans–marked down from $174–at the Metropark shop in downtown San Francisco’s Westfield Mall. “I think we got the best price possible,” she said.
“It’s a fun app to use,” said Mr. Tang, from Sunnyvale, Calif., noting that he’s not shy about checking the price in front of store clerks.