Tablets Generating More "Mobile Shopping" than Smart Phones

New research suggests some 22 percent of U.S. tablet-owning consumers spend $50 or more per month and nine percent spend $100 or more. That is much higher than spending levels by smart phone owners, ABI Research says. “Tablets are quickly becoming the go-to transaction screen within the home,” says ABI Research mobile devices senior practice director Jeff Orr.

Some will argue that “tablet commerce” really is not “mobile commerce,” a point well taken, as most tablets are used when people are not actually “mobile” but inside their homes or offices. On the other hand, perhaps a majority of mobile device usage likewise occurs when people are inside their homes or offices, so the definitions are a bit fuzzy.

The larger and notable point is that mobile and untethered devices are becoming a bigger factor in consumer “buying” and “shopping,” a fact that explains the huge interest on the part of application providers in mobile advertising, mobile promotion and mobile commerce.

Virtually nobody would argue that tablet commerce or mobile commerce has seriously affected retail stores. But few might be willing to argue that this always will be the case.

Logistics, such as price checking, using a coupon and location-based searches, consistently rank as the most common activities performed by more than 50 percent of tablet shoppers in the previous 90 days, while shopping, ABI Research has found.

​At the close of 2012, ABI Research estimates, nearly 200 million tablets will have shipped worldwide since 2009 and an additional one billion tablets are forecasted to ship over the next five years. That growing installed base of users is certain to lead to higher commerce volume.

Mobile commerce already represents double digit billions worth of transaction volume.

According to comScore e-commerce research, 10 percent of online retail dollars spent in the third quarter of 2012 were spent from users on mobile devices.

That might grow to 12 percent to 13 percent during the fourth quarter of 2012.

Make no mistake, neither “mobile shopping” or “tablet shopping” are especially large transaction categories right now, compared either to total retail shopping or even online shopping.

But most observers think mobile is destined to become much bigger, for obvious reasons, among them prosaic issues such as the generally more difficult display advertising business on small screen devices.

That suggests commerce might be a bigger fit for mobile devices.