Tablets, Mobile E-Commerce and Mobify

Tablets, Mobile E-Commerce and Mobify

If you haven’t noticed, tablets are becoming a bit of a big deal.

The supposed panacea to all the problems of print media has a new king: the iPad 2. While initially hailed as the saviour of print, the iPad has fast risen to the top of mobile devices used for browsing the web.

In fact, every single one of our e-commerce sites has the iPad as one of the top 10 devices used to access their respective stores.

However, tablets are not phones. Their screens are considerably larger, eliminating much of the need to dramatically change the UI, as is needed on phones. Some store’s desktop websites look just as good on a tablet as they do on a monitor. This does not mean that tablets should be treated as desktop computers. Even if you can see elements well, you still need to make buttons large enough to be pressed with sometimes imprecise fingers.

This leaves tablets in a bit of a liminal space; should they be treated as phones or desktops? Even Google Analytics counts tablets as phones (in its default setting). It seems everyone is a little confused about how to treat them, which is understandable considering how recently they truly penetrated the public consciousness with the original iPad.

Now, with the iPad 2 and a long line of purported iPad killers like the Motorola Xoom and BlackBerry Playbook soon to be released, more tablets than ever will be browsing the web.

How will this affect mobile e-commerce? Well, we expect tablet traffic on all of our client’s sites to continue to grow rapidly. Mobify has supported tablets for a long time now, but have recently seen a sharp increase in requests for tablet-optimized stores from clients. Mobify is already experienced in creating tablet interfaces, having already been a part of various iPad experiences, including The GAP’s 1969 Stream iPad app, a launch app announced at the original iPad launch!

More exciting times lie ahead with tablets and mobile e-commerce. Stay tuned!