Smartphones and tablets will take a lead role in the forthcoming holiday shopping season, IBM Corp. predicts in its newly published forecast for the five-day retail frenzy, pushing the trend of mobile payments to new heights. If the tech giant is to be believed, 2014 will go down in the history books as a year of broken records for the e-commerce industry.

Combining real-time data from users of the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark software and U.S. Census Bureau observations, Big Blue has concluded that mobile devices will account for over 48 percent of traffic during the December shopping extravaganza, up from 39.7 percent last year. The company expects that this increase will push the percentage of all Thanksgiving deals done through smartphones and tablets past the 50 percent mark for the first time, a more than twofold percent increase over the same period in 2013.

Yet despite anticipating a massive surge in mobile orders, IBM sees Thanksgiving losing its place as the top riser of the holiday season to Cyber Monday, bumping the traditional shopping day of Black Friday down to the third spot on the growth chart in the latest sign of trouble for brick-and-mortar operations. That is also reflected in Big Blue’s projection that the top-rising category of products bought in-store – health and beauty gifts – will gain only 4.7 percent over last year compared to the 15 percent increase retailers are set to see online.

Surprisingly, that represents a decline of several percentage points from the growth figures IBM published for the 2013 holiday season, which could indicate that the e-commerce bandwagon is slowing down as it transitions from a trend to an everyday reality. But Big Blue has identified a different reason behind the drop: consumers have become smarter in how they shop.

IBM forecasts that increased use of coupons will send the average order size falling 2.9 percent from 2013 to $123.28 even as the average number of items per purchase is set to increase 17 percent to 4.4. But the company expects the distribution of those deals to to remain more or less the same: although they will generate online half as much traffic as smartphones, tablets are poised to account for twice as many transactions owning to the bigger screen size.

Together, the two device categories will drive a projected 35 percent of clicks on e-mail promotions, which IBM anticipates will draw 10 percent more interest from customers than last year thanks to wider adoption of analytics software among marketers That is good news in and of itself, both for consumers and Big Blue’s data crunching business.

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