E-Commerce Retailers and the Tablet

Mercator Overviews

by Mercator Advisory Group July 19, 2011 2:41 pm0

The rise of the tablet, and outside of a handful of devices that means the iPad, is causing online retailers to evaluate their support for this new form factor. This article’s thrust is that retailers need to at least plan for a “t-commerce” version of their websites. Today’s mobile commerce sites, optimized for the small screen real estate of a smartphone, leave a lot to be desired when viewed on a tablet device.

Optimization of the standard website for viewing on tablet devices is the answer and the article goes on to discuss the use of HTML5 as a remedy. An obvious challenge of this transition is that we don’t navigate the tablet through clicks and mouse pointer. We use our fingers to poke buttons, drag icons, and generally interact quite differently. Capturing this new interaction behavior requires optimization, if not a completely different website for tablet devices.

Tablet commerce may be the new kid on the block when it comes to online retail, but as a recent Forrester research poll indicates, many online retailers are seeing that half of their mobile commerce transactions come from tablet devices.

Moreover, 7.6 percent of the U.S. population will be tablet users by the end of 2012, according to eMarketer estimates.

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