Data released by eBay/PayPal and IBM today show some early holiday 2011 digital commerce trends. PayPal (and parent eBay) said that there were two mobile shopping peaks yesterday across its various sites. The first happened between 1pm and 2pm PST. The other occurred between 6pm and 7pm PST.

The most popular merchandise categories on eBay mobile were the following:

1. Clothing, Shoes & Accessories
2. Cell Phones & PDAs
3. Jewelry & Watches
4. Collectibles
5. Toys & Hobbies

The top mobile-purchased items in the electronics category were: 

1. iPhone Accessories
2. Apple iPhone 4 - 16GB – Black
3. Apple iPod Touch 4th Generation 8GB

PayPal also recorded a "511% [increase] in global mobile payment volume compared to Thanksgiving 2010."

IBM reported that "Thanksgiving 2011 sales were up 39 percent over Thanksgiving 2010." The company also said the following about mobile traffic and purchases yesterday:

• Traffic to retail sites reached 15.2%, up from 6.4% last year
• Number of consumers buying on mobile devices increased to 11.09%, up from just over 4% last year.

EBay has said that it will record roughly $5 billion in mobile purchases and PayPal will process $3.5 billion in mobile payments by the end of 2011. Of course these sites, and rival Amazon, are leveraging a huge installed base of users. These are not new mobile adopters but existing customers who are using mobile apps to carry out transactions. Both eBay and Amazon have invested heavily in mobile apps and their overall mobile user experiences.

All of this is helped quite a bit by consumer credit cards already on file. Most other retailer sites will see significant increases in traffic from mobile devices but not corresponding purchases. The reasons for this will be a poor mobile user experience and/or lack of a stored credit card number. One solution is Card.io, which captures credit card information through the smartphone camera, eliminating the need to key in 16 digits.