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Thanksgiving online shoppers bought twice as much through phones as through tablets

Another reminder that if your mobile website stinks, you are handing sales to the competition.

Three teens in a room, each looking at his or her phone
Three teens in a room, each looking at his or her phone
Ute Grabowsky / Photothek via Getty Images
Jason Del Rey
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.

An annual reminder for retailers: If your mobile website looks like crap on a phone, you are increasingly handing over sales to your competition.

More than a quarter of online sales on Thanksgiving — 27 percent, to be exact — took place via mobile phones, compared with 22 percent last year, according to Adobe, which tracks $7.50 of every $10 spent online.

That mobile phone market share is more than double that of tablets, which accounted for just 13 percent of online sales on Thanksgiving 2016, down from 15 percent on Thanksgiving 2015.

The remaining 60 percent of online sales this time happened on desktop or laptop computers, but that number continues to shrink each year as retailers improve the navigation and checkout experience on mobile websites and apps and consumers get more comfortable making purchases via phones.

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Still, visitors to mobile websites and apps convert into shoppers at a lower rate than those shopping via tablets or desktop computers. Only around 2 percent of visitors to mobile sites ended up making a purchase, compared with just under 4 percent on tablets and just over 4 percent on desktop sites.

Over time, payment features such as Apple Pay, Android Pay and PayPal One Touch are expected to help increase conversation rates on phones because they reduce the number of steps needed to make a purchase.

Overall, Adobe predicts that Thanksgiving online sales grew 11.5 percent over last year to $1.93 billion. Adobe originally expected that number to cross $2 billion, but steep discounts, as well as heavier-than-expected spending on Thanksgiving Eve, impacted Thanksgiving Day sales totals.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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