Tablet Commerce is seen as increasingly vital to online sales

Although smartphones provide a very important channel, it’s the larger screens that bring in the big sales.

While smartphones may be attracting a great deal more attention from the media than tablet commerce, the story is notably different when it comes to the perspective of the retailer.

These merchants have recognized that the larger screens are the most important place for focus.

Tablet commerce is vital to retailers because these bigger mobile devices are used by consumers to do more of their online retail browsing than smartphones. Even though the penetration rate of smartphones is greater than that of tablets among consumers in the United States, the larger screens make up notably more retail traffic and sales than the smaller counterparts.

It is this knowledge that makes tablet commerce the most important channel in mobile.

BI Intelligence has recently released a report that examined the entire mobile commerce environment and determined that retailers have taken their time in differentiating between the performance of tablets and of smartphones. M-commerce as a whole and the individual branch of t-commerce provide different results, and merchants are only just now starting to recognize this and take action on what they know.

The report has made some recommendations for retailers and where they should be placing their focus in order to respect the importance of tablet commerce. The reason that they feel that they should prioritize the larger screen include:

• Higher order values than those made over smartphones and four times the overall revenue (at an average order value of $151 over tablets and $124 over smartphones).
• More overall traffic from larger screen devices.
• Greater retail traffic as consumers prefer visiting retail websites over tablets than over smartphones.
• Improved conversion rates as larger mobile devices convert seven times more than smaller when it came to paid search clicks in the United States. The iPad brought in the vast majority of those conversions.
• Better user demographic, as tablet computers are more likely to be owned by consumers and households that are within the higher income bracket, which are key targets for retailers.