Dive Brief:

• The end of tablets as the next big thing in online activity seems to have been accelerated by Apple’s bigger-screen iPhones 6 and increased mobile shopping in general.

• Mobile shopping rose more than 75%, well past shopping activity on tablets for the first time over the Black Friday shopping weekend, according to IBM. Smartphones saw some 17.1% of Cyber Monday spending by of 3 p.m. in New York, compared to 11.1% on tablets, according to IBM. Last year, by contrast, tablets were the winner, outpacing smartphone purchases at 12.5% for tablets against 10.5% on smartphones.

• Tablet sales globally are expected to fall 8.1% this year to 211 million, according to IDC, while smartphone sales were already up 6.8% to 355 million in Q3 alone.

Dive Insight:

With even larger smartphones available to consumers in the pockets and the ability to be used pretty much anywhere, this phenomenon will likely come as no surprise.

The bigger screens found on Apple’s iPhones 6 are no doubt contributing to the shift. But easier payments and more mobile-optimized web sites and apps from retailers are making shopping easier on any smartphone. That’s all pushing tablets aside, IBM marketing cloud director Jay Henderson told Bloomberg. 

“It’s a pretty big shift in consumer behavior,” Henderson said to Bloomberg. “Retailers are making it easier for people to shop on their smartphones, the devices are bigger and consumers are getting more comfortable purchasing on small devices.”

And that in turn is dinging store traffic, according to data from the National Retail Federation and others. More than 103 million shoppers were online over the Black Friday weekend, compared to fewer than 102 million who went to physical stores, the NRF found.