The company’s research has shown that tablet using customers are a highly appealing demographic.
On Christmas in 2011, millions of consumers received tablets as gifts, and Harry and David observed a sudden increase in the amount of t-commerce traffic that was heading to their website.
For this reason, the company has now launched a website that is tablet friendly to cater to these shoppers.
Since last year, the number of t-commerce customers has continued to grow, making the new website for the company an especially relevant one. This is particularly true as the company has observed that the tablet using consumers are highly lucrative ones. The director of mobile and tablet e-commerce at Harry and David Holdings Inc., Sue Eagan, said that there has been consistent growth in that environment ever since the end of last year.
Today, t-commerce traffic is double what it was at the same time last year and the trend is upward.
Eagan explained that the rapid growth trend is only continuing and that 90 percent of the t-commerce activity on the site comes from iPads. The new website is specially optimized to make it ideal for use on tablet devices with several operating systems, not just iOS.
The t-commerce website was created through the social, and mobile commerce technology of Skava. Eagen explained that “The desktop site worked fine on tablets overall but it really wasn’t optimized for how consumers interact with their tablets.” She then went on to say that the problem was that it wasn’t optimized for a touch screen, and that touch and swipe was not available.
She stated that “There were opportunities to better leverage our imagery; our customers really enjoy the photography, we put a lot into it and it resonates with them.” Eagen also pointed out that there were certain usability elements that were urgently needed so that users would be able to use their fingers on touch screen sin order to take advantage of the site features.
For example, it needed to be designed so that the precision of a mouse was not required, and so that it didn’t have features such as hovering the cursor on the t-commerce site, which isn’t possible with a finger on a touchscreen.
