The latest Monetate Ecommerce report has brought to light some very interesting findings, especially that of tablet devices beating smartphones so far as the total website traffic from mobile devices is concerned. For those who prefer hardcore figures, total e-commerce traffic from tablets now constitute 12.44 percent of all e-commerce traffic, with smartphones lagging close behind at 9.69 percent. What the report also points out is that the number of users who have been hitting retail sites via smartphones or tablets have gone up more than three times in the last two years from a 7 percent to 22 percent.
What this proves is that tablets have emerged as the preferred device for surfing the net or for online shopping. Of course, the bigger display is useful here compared to smartphones, which typically max out at five-inch displays. Users naturally will be more comfortable doing their shopping via a tablet than a smartphone. Not surprisingly, it is the iPad that has emerged as the dominant tablet based on website traffic (90.63 percent), while iPhone is leading the smartphone segment with 62.73 percent traffic. The same applies to conversion rates as well with both the iPad and iPhone registering 2.6 and 1.01 conversion rates in the tablet and smartphone segment respectively.
Website traffic for Android as a whole amounted to a dismal 7.63 percent for tablet devices though the same from smartphones running the Google operating system made a far better 35.92 percent. Similarly, conversion rates for Android stands at 2 percent and 0.88 percent for tablet and smartphone devices respectively.
In light of the above, marketers are looking at optimizing the web experience so that smartphone and tablet users are more comfortable hitting the sites from their respective device. This assumes special significance on the back of reports of both gaining far greater user acceptance in the coming years while we witness the gradual decline of the traditional forms of computing. Designing suitable apps or optimizing the web experience for these users are just of the means being explored to drive home better traffic from the mobile devices.
What the report also reveals is the decline in influence that email-based marketing efforts have registered on e-commerce. Instead, it is the social networking sites that seem to have emerged as the best destination for online marketing. Facebook has come out on top, contributing 60 percent of the referrals to online retailing sites. Pinterest and Twitter are the other significant players here, contributing about 20 percent and 10 percent of referrals to online shopping sites.
In the meantime, Monetate is also promoting the use of what it has termed as the ‘Impact Score’ to better ascertain the impact that each segment of the consumers can have on a particular business. While the company report described Impact Scores as “the difference between the rate of a behavior in one customer segment from the rate of a behavior in all website visitors multiplied by the number of visitors in the same segment,” what can be stated in simple terms is that the purchasing experience for smartphone and tablet users have to be improved as more take to these devices in future.
All the above mentioned information is relevant for the second quarter of 2013.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I'll likely make a film sometime in the future.
