PayPal continues to tout the huge increase in mobile shopping it's seeing this holiday season compared with last year's. According to the company, mobile payment volume, which PayPal defines as online shopping done through a smartphone or tablet, was nearly three times higher (196 percent) on this year's Cyber Monday than last year.

(Cyber Monday, of course, is the Monday after the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and the day when shoppers supposedly descend on the Internet like virtual locusts to do their online shopping.)

In a post on the company blog, PayPal called this year's holiday shopping "a huge shift in online shopping behaviors" reflected by more consumers turning to mobile devices to make purchases.

PayPal plans to continue its efforts to capitalize on the shift in payment behaviors in both offline and online settings. In a meeting with reporters yesterday, company president David Marcus discussed PayPal's ongoing strategy to move into the offline world. He emphasized that PayPal's offerings are about more than payments and that they provide merchants with a raft of tools like data analysis and geolocation to help merchants connect with customers at the right time with the right offer.

"Companies that are solely trying to solve payments offline are going to fail," Marcus said in a post on Mashable." A lot of companies are obsessed with payments at point of sale. With payments offline there’s no real problem to fix."

PayPal and its parent company, eBay Inc., said they will continue to track the impact of mobile devices on holiday shopping, so expect more eye-popping data on mobile commerce as the holiday season progresses.

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