Mobile shopping may be growing, but old-school desktops are still king of online shopping

Shoppers spent more time browsing and purchasing gifts on their smartphones and tablets during the 2014 holiday shopping season, but still relied on old-school desktop computers for most of their Christmas spending blitz.

According to data released by IBM, sales on mobile devices saw a 27 percent increase in November and December 2014 over the same period in 2013. And yet sales made through smartphones and tablets still only accounted for about 23 percent of online sales overall, with a whopping 77 percent of sales coming from desktops. The findings underscore a key challenge the retail industry faces as it courts shoppers in era of rapid innovation. Many are making big investments to build easy-to-use mobile sites or apps to appeal to the tech-savvy shoppers that they're desperate to lure, and yet they cannot neglect the traditional Web presence that still pulls down the lion's share of shoppers' money.