• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, June 5, 2014

Online shopping continues to move from desktop to mobile.

Mobile is driving both more traffic and sales compared to a year ago, based on a new tracking study.

As a percentage of traffic, mobile has increased from 24% a year ago to 34% today, according to the latest monthly stats from Affiliate Window, which runs networks in the U.K. and U.S. The data is based on more than 2.5 million network transactions across 1,600 advertisers in retail, travel and telecom.

By device type, Apple continues to lead with almost three quarters (69%) of traffic, a very slight decrease from the same month last year.

For one of the bottom line measures of sales, mobile continued its rise from 19% of sales last year to almost a third (31%) of sales now.

Digging deeper into the stats, we see that traffic from iPads decreased from 81% to 73%, with Android tablet visits increasing from 19% to 27%.

However, when it comes to tablet sales, Apple continues to dominate with 82% of tablet sales compared to Android at 16%. This is actually a drop for Android tablet sales from last year and a slight increase for iPads.

While Apple continues to lead in tablet sales, Google is gaining in smartphone purchasing. Sales through iPhones dropped from 93% last year to 74% now while Android now accounts for 25% of sales made on smartphones.

The key trend is that mobile now accounts for more than a third of traffic and almost a third of sales. This is significant, since the average value of mobile orders was $118, showing that more money continues to move through mobile.

This is consistent with other research, identifying the clear transition away from researching and shopping on desktop to mobile.

Retailers should be closely watching the traffic rather than the transaction stats. Traffic, or mobile visits to research and check products, could have a more significant impact at a retail store as consumers become savvier in what they want to buy before they even go the store.