It Was an ‘iFriday’ to Remember for Apple Inc. (AAPL)

Using the term ‘Black Friday’ for the Friday after Thanksgiving has been prominent in popular culture for a little under five decades, but the performance by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) on this year’s holiday may prompt pundits to consider a new name. In a fanboy’s world, ‘iFriday’ or ‘AppleDay’ may be the best candidates. All jokes aside, we can’t say that Apple dominated the shopping day solely because of sales – existing analyses have used rather limited data sets – but we can point to a more comprehensive study done by International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) that looked at how people were shopping online.

Originally reported in this handy Holiday Benchmark Infographic released by IBM, the overall number of shoppers doing their Black Friday shopping online increased by more than 20%, but that’s not all. Of that traffic, mobile devices accounted for nearly one-sixth of all online shopping – up from one-tenth in 2011 – which was split fairly evenly between smartphones and tablets. Regarding the latter, Apple’s iPad accounted for a whopping 88.3% of online shopping via tablet, according to IBM, which dominated the Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS) Nook (3.1%), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle (2.4%), and Samsung Galaxy (1.8%) quite handily.

If the iPad was stacked up against all mobile devices, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) would still take nearly 10% of the cake with its tablet, while the iPhone accounted for 8.7% of all traffic in this arena. Moreover, IBM also points out that we’re apt at multitasking, as Black Friday-ers “shopped in store, online and on mobile devices simultaneously to get the best bargains,” in addition to buying” more overall […] with greater frequency to take advantage of retailer deals and free shipping.”

It’s also worth noting that the breakdown for Cyber Monday online shopping habits was rather similar to that of Black Friday, with an even bigger spike in year over year traffic. Here’s the full study from IBM, though the graphics sum up the information rather nicely, which can be seen by following the link above.

Recall that this data falls in line with what Tim Cook said at Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s last product release show, where he mentioned that the iPad accounted for more than 90% of web traffic in the tablet arena. Does it seem unusual to you that although it holds just over half of the tablet market share, the iPad is used to surf the Internet much more frequently than its peers are?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.