This year may go down as the period that shopping by mobile phone during the holidays came into its own.
Black Friday saw greater use of mobile phones by consumers to zero in on and make purchases, industry data reviewed by Dow Jones show.
From a very small base last year, mobile online payments through PayPal surged nearly 650%, said Amanda Pires, senior director of marketing at the online payment service.
PayPal is a unit of eBay Inc. and is also used by about half of the top 100 online retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Best Buy Co. and Sears Holdings Corp.
More retailers have made it easier to shop and complete purchases using mobile devices, and consumers are responding, Ms. Pires said.
There is a proliferation of smart phones and savvier and more comfortable users. People are doing a lot of comparative shopping, at home and in brick and mortar stores, which is also spurring mobile device use.
Searches from mobile devices jumped from around 5,000 on Black Friday in 2008 to roughly 200,000 this year, said Siva Kumar, chief executive of TheFind.com, a product search engine.
"People were taking advantage of their mobile phones to compare prices once they were inside stores," Mr. Kumar said.
In terms of search hits, from computers, mobile phones and other devices, Amazon.com Inc. received the most volume on TheFind.com -- about six times the amount of Wal-Mart, Kumar said. He attributed the higher volume to lower prices on Amazon.com in many cases, and its lack of sales tax.
Kohl's Corp., Macy's Inc., Target Corp. and Best Buy were among other sites that had large amounts of hits on TheFind.com.
High-end department store Saks Inc. dropped off the top 10 sites in terms of hit-volume this year, Mr. Kumar said.
Toys and electronics very much eclipsed apparel and other merchandise, Mr. Kumar said.
