January 28, 2013
Since Apple unveiled the iPad in April 2010, dozens of others, from Samsung to Barnes & Noble, have jumped on the tablet bandwagon. Today, tablets can do virtually everything a desktop computer can do, including shopping. It’s no wonder that retailers have started adapting their marketing strategies to appeal to tablet shoppers.
Tablet ownership has doubled between pre-Christmas 2011 and today (you can probably guess what the big Christmas item was last year). The United States now has 55 million tablet users – that’s close to a fifth of the population, including those too old and too young to use them. That number is projected to grow even more on December 25, 2012.
Business owners have taken note of the tablet trend. Fortunately, the very nature of tablet devices lends itself to impulse buying. Many tablets, like Amazon‘s Kindle Fire and many others, contain permanent links to online music stores, book stores and application stores on their desktop, and purchases can be made with a tap of the screen. Indeed, 80% of purchases from mobile devices in 2011 came from tablet users while 20% came from smartphone users (those numbers were reversed in 2010). Indeed, tablet use is growing at ten times the rate of smart phone use. According to retailers, tablet users also spend more when they shop.
Of course, most people who can afford tablets are solidly middle class, so one could argue that tablets may not be selling more products – people who can afford tablets simply spend more money. Nonetheless, retailers are now specifically catering to the mobile market. Many retailers now have versions of their webpages specifically for mobile use. Mobile websites often have fewer features in favor of faster load times and a cleaner interface, and they are optimized for tablet features like tap-zooming.
So who is the average tablet user? Research shows that it’s the 18-34 male demographic that the majority of video game studios cater to. This seems like an obvious target audience, but just as game consoles have gained wider appeal as they have added more features, the same is likely to be true for tablets; tablets specially designed for kids are already topping many children’s Christmas list this year.
infographic provided by Miva Merchant E-Commerce Software