The Asus may be the best selling tablet in Japan over the past holiday season, and Google catalogs are a prime example of the type of shopping tablet users are becoming fond of, but it’s the iPad type user that seems to be driving consumer trends via tablets.
Online shopping has grown tremendously over the years and has become equally as commonplace for some people as is checking email for others. In fact, the use of tablets to do shopping is even becoming more so the standard as more and more tablets replace PC’s as the typical computing devices for family members.
A study was recently put out by Adobe, that helps further identify current mobile trends. This time as they relate to the use of tablets and smartphones for shopping and making buying decisions that actually end in generating a sale.
Out of the approximately 1,000 consumers surveyed, the study found that 55% of those that used tablets were more likely to shop and complete a purchase online, whereas only 28% of those that typically browsed catalogs and shopped online with smartphones did likewise.
Something the research did not conclude but should be considered with regards to the mobile market. Most people would consider smartphones a common device today, much more so than a tablet at this point. Tablets tend to be more of a purchase that is more of a luxury, than a necessity. It can therefore also be presumed that people who usually purchase online with tablets also have more expendable income (generally speaking) than say your typical, lower cost, Android smartphone and tablet user which happen to make up a large part of the world market these days. Our conclusion can be said to be upheld by data from a Forbes report that suggests, “There continues to be rapid growth of white-box or utility and basic tablets as well, given the low costs of production attained using components from Chinese chip producers”, but “The premium class of tablets [i.e. iPad 2] is generating the majority of revenue in the global tablet market.”
In research put together not long ago, we also found that smartphone and tablet apps can be a hard sell for media consumption. The same doesn’t necessarily seem to apply to those that are shopping and looking to purchase products. A quote by Terry Fortesue of Adobe seems to agree with that as well when he says that, “Our research shows retail apps and catalogs serve different purposes on tablets and smartphones, providing value to the consumer depending on the device they’re using“. None the less, whether tablet shoppers or smartphone shoppers, “retail and catalog apps are rapidly catching up to mobile browsers as a viable shopping channel”.
Overall, half of the entire group (both smartphone users and tablet users) favored using an a mobile app to make shop and make purchases, whereas the other half had a preference for simply using a standard mobile browser. Of those that didn’t frequently use their mobile devices to shop at all, only 25% of such people used mobile apps to shop in the 2013 mobile app survey.
Related Posts: The Nexus 7 Tablet Overtakes The iPad in Japanese Sales, The Consumption Of Digital Press By Today’s Tablet & Smart-Phone Users