Tablet based shopping is growing in numbers and in transaction size, but smartphones are catching up.
According to Bizrate Insights Q1 2016 data that has been recently released, mobile commerce sales being transacted over iPhones have now caught up to the lead which has previously been held by iPads.
The larger screen tablet devices had previously been seen as m-commerce drivers but their sales share has declined.
It is not that tablet shopping is drooping. In fact, it is continuing a healthy growth rate, particularly over iPads. However, iPhones have also been experiencing rapid growth in mobile commerce sales, to the point that they have been catching up with iPads and have now finally matched them, say the Bizrate Insights figures. The share of purchases made over the smartphones has been steadily eating into that of the tablets, which had held a solid lead for quite some time.
iPhones now have a 36 percent share of mobile commerce sales and achieved this during the first quarter of the year.
According to the vice president of Bizrate Insights, Hayley Silver, “Once the lion’s share of online purchases on mobile, tablets are still declining as a percentage of online sales; meanwhile smartphones continue capturing a larger piece of the pie.” Smartphone users are becoming increasingly confident in looking for products and services and actually buying them with their smaller-screen devices.
At the same time, Bizrate Insights, which is a division of Connexity, reported that thought he growth of iPad tablet shopping has been steady, the purchases made over the devices have been losing ground in the market as a whole. Some have speculated that the iPads numbers have not kept up with the growth rate of iPhone shopping as the interest that consumers have shown in the mobile device itself has started to fade.
Moreover, Android has also been making some significant moves in the shopping sector, taking on 28 percent of the mobile shopping sales that occurred during Q1 of this year.
It also continues to be recognized that while mobile commerce sales continue to take on a growing percentage of online transactions, desktop and laptop computers still hold a considerable majority of the total.
