71 Million Users Will Make a Purchase On Their Tablet in 2013, Report Says
Some 71 million tablet owners will make purchases via their device this year, compared to 53 million buyers using smartphones, according to eMarketer forecasts. By percentage, 63 percent of tablet users will make a purchase using their device versus 39 percent via smartphone. The market research firm calls 2013 the year of fragmentation in the mobile device category in which diverging use cases on smartphones and tablets mark the end of mobile devices as a “monolithic” category. By 2017, eMarketer predicts, 125 million tablet owners will make purchases on their devices and 90 million smartphone owners will buy through their phones.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
As a result, advertising and commerce solutions will need to respond to different screen sizes and screen uses, eMarketer said. The larger screens on tablets offer a better experience for “lean-back” activities, including watching videos and shopping, it said. According to eMarketer data, more U.S. consumers shop, as opposed to make purchases, on their smartphones than on their tablets -- 102 million versus 94 million -- according to April estimates. The disparity is due to wider ownership of smartphones overall and that smartphone owners use their phones in more situations than tablet owners. On a percentage basis, however, 84 percent of tablet owners are forecast to shop on their devices for the same period, compared with 75 percent of smartphone owners, it said.
As use cases for mobile devices continue to diverge, smartphones will become a “more essential partner” for marketers looking to drive consumers into stores or connect with them in-store as they “showroom” by searching for product reviews, comparing prices and looking for deals, eMarketer said. Tablets, meanwhile, will continue to “steal time” from TV viewing and from shopping time on a desktop PC, eMarketer predicts, and they will compete for brand advertising budgets in a second-screen world.
Tablets are already taking a fast-rising share of ad requests, eMarketer said. Context dictates different action metrics in response to ads served to tablets and smartphones. A survey from IDG Research Services, for example, found tablet owners in 2012 to be far more likely than smartphones owners to click on ads, and also to research or purchase a product after seeing an ad, eMarketer noted. But the discrepancies were minor when it came to looking for a product in a retail store, suggesting, as a number of studies have shown, that a relevant ad -— combined with proximity to a brick-and-mortar store —- can be effective at driving smartphone owners through the door, it said.
As usage activity increases across mobile devices via “multiple paths and different screens,” marketers need to be able to influence a purchase from “almost anywhere,” eMarketer said.