Tablets More Conducive to Online Shopping Than Smartphones

A recent white paper from the e-tailing group shows that tablet devices are quite friendly for consumers looking to make online purchases. Tablet users not only make more online purchases via their devices than smartphone owners do – they’re more satisfied as well.

The white paper, titled “The ‘Shopping’ Mindset of the Mobile Consumers,” was conducted by the e-tailing group and sponsored by Coffee Table. It used an online survey in February, targeting shoppers who spent $250 or more online annually and currently owned a smartphone and/or tablet.

Of the surveyed group, 52 percent owned only a smartphone, 17 percent owned only a tablet and 31 percent owned both a smartphone and tablet.

For smartphone owners, 43 percent did not download any shopping apps in the past year, while 38 percent downloaded 1-5 shopping apps in the past year and 13 percent downloaded 6-10.

In the past six months, looking up store information was the most popular form of usage of a smartphone prior to visiting a store, followed by checking for sales and specials, looking for competitive pricing at Amazon, browsing a store for a product of interest, and checking product ratings and reviews.

Browsers on smartphones are nearly evenly divided between heavy (daily/weekly) at 22 percent, monthly at 28 percent, intermittent at 25 percent or no usage at all at 25 percent.

According to the survey, 32 percent of smartphone owners thought their mobile shopping experience was very satisfying, while 41 percent thought it was somewhat satisfying and 24 percent thought it was satisfying.

Awkward shopping experience on a phone was the top reason (49 percent) for not shopping more on smartphones, followed by concerns about credit card information (36 percent), slow connections/connectivity (31 percent), poor quality of the product image (26 percent) and the difficulty of viewing product information (23 percent).

For tablet owners, most respondents agreed that tablets were ideal for researching products before making final purchases, followed by tablets being ideal for browsing favorite catalogs and retailers, and that they were ideal for purchasing from favorite catalogs and retailers.

Receiving alerts on promotions and products was deemed to be a very to somewhat valuable function by the majority of tablet owners, followed by browsing favorite catalogs, free app marketplace to browse and discover new catalogs, receiving new catalogs automatically when available, purchasing from multiple catalogs through a single checkout process, and managing subscriptions to individual catalogs.

According to the survey, 54 percent of tablet owners made 1-5 purchases in the past six months, while 48 percent of smartphone owners said the same. Twelve percent of tablet owners and 9 percent of smartphone owners made 6-10 purchases, while 12 percent of tablet owners and 7 percent of smartphone owners made more than 10 purchases. Meanwhile, 22 percent of tablet owners and 36 percent of smartphone owners made no purchases.

Books/magazines, clothing and accessories, digital books, consumer electronics, and computer hardware and software were the most popular products or services purchased for tablets and smartphones overall.

The survey also revealed that 50 percent of tablet owners are very satisfied with their recent shopping experiences, while 32 percent of smartphone owners said the same. Also, 39 percent of tablet owners said their shopping experience on a tablet was significantly better than on a smartphone, followed by 30 percent who said somewhat better.

Source:

http://www.shopcoffeetable.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/e-Tailing-Whitepaper-March-2011.pdf