Shopping via Tablets On The Rise

There has been a lot of buzz lately about iPads and other tablet type devices and how more and more shoppers are using them. An article that came out today on Mashable titled: Tablet Commerce Expected to Explode in 2011 really caught my attention. They cite a recent report by Forrester and some of the quotes and their pie chart are quite eye-opening. For the home decorating industries (including the flooring industry) we need to pay attention to these new tablet shoppers.

For example, here are some quotes for the article:

Forrester says, “Tablet devices, on the other hand, will grow by capturing share from traditional PC web traffic by untethering shoppers from their desktops, enabling easy browsing in a living room, during a bus commute to work, or at an airport.”

"...Many retailers report that already half of what they consider to be mobile traffic is coming through tablet devices.”

So how will this effect us? Time will tell. One thing you should be doing right now is monitoring your website analytics to see the type of devices your website traffic is using. (In Google Analytics you can easily see the devices used by your website visitors, as well as screen resolution, operating system, web browser, and much more.)

Click to enlarge - MarketingYourStore.com browser /OS visitors

Another thing that caught my attention was about social media retailing / selling:

“To the degree that retailers find any benefit at all from social strategies,” the report reads, “it is most frequently driven by tactics like ratings and reviews on a website rather than activities on social networks… Social networks, in fact, ranked dead last on a list of 10 customer acquisition tactics.”

By the way, if you are a Verizon Wireless customer are you going to order the iPhone? I did first thing this morning.

To add to this shopping from wireless devices on the go... Google Launches Shopping App for iPhone. Good thing I didn't order my wife an iPhone. :-)