Tips for Optimizing the Tablet Shopping Experience

As adoption of the tablet approaches its tipping point, more and more retailers are looking to create an optimized experience for the tablet shopper. This article explores some ways that retailers can improve this experience and ultimately drive sales.

Tablets have dramatically changed the retail landscape. Their importance is measured by an unprecedented growth of mobile browsing, rapid adoption by a younger and wealthier demographic than that of traditional PC users, and a growing percentage of online sales coming from tablets. According to eMarketer's 2013 forecast, t-commerce (tablets) will account for 9.4 percent of all online sales this year, an increase of 73 percent from 2012. As a result, the pressure is on to make the tablet shopping experience as pleasurable and convenient as possible.

Given this explosion of adoption, there's a plethora of highly effective yet oft confusing terms and tools in the mobile marketplace. Responsive design, mobile optimization, HTML5 and native apps can all be touted as catch-all panaceas for mobile strategy. But rather than opting for one particular tool as the solution to all your mobile problems, the first step is to understand the end user, define the context of their experience, and use this to reverse engineer the solution.

As Apple's recent quarterly financial results showed, the world is rapidly shifting from the desktop world of clicks and scrolling to a tablet/smartphone marketplace of gestures, pinching and zooming. This has transformed the way users are engaging with content and commerce on their devices. This is dramatically apparent on the tablet, whose owners are known as "couch and pillow" shoppers because usage tends to happen in the evening, outside of traditional PC shopping hours.

This leisurely search for entertainment, goods and services lends itself to a more lifestyle-driven customer journey with an appreciation for art direction, customer reviews and a curated shopping experience. A great example is the Net-A-Porter weekly magazine iPad app. The app seamlessly fuses videos from fashion shows, travel destinations, music and culture all designed to inspire its customers.

New innovations are improving the tablet shopping experience and reducing the frustrations that used to plague early tablet usage. For example, shopping baskets can now be "contained" within the app. This means that your customers don't have to experience the confusing transfer from your app to your web page to shop, and back again. Now they can browse your catalog and add products to the shopping basket in one click. Only when they've finished browsing your app do consumers check out from your shopping basket on your website. Conversion rates are dramatically higher as a result of this built-in shopping capability.

Group FMG recently worked with two clients in the U.K., a top-10 retailer and ASDA (Wal-Mart's UK arm). Both clients wanted to leverage their existing digital catalog assets to drive tablet sales during the holidays. The former has a customer base that possesses a high disposable income for top-of-the-line home goods. Thus, a superior customer experience for their loyal customers is of the utmost importance. The resulting native iPad app was designed with this in mind. The week it launched, the app was featured No. 1 in The Guardian's app list and garnered hundreds of thousands of downloads. ASDA's customers are a much broader demographic and, thus, use a variety of mobile devices. Email is their main distribution channel, so HTML5 was the selected platform for its Christmas catalog, as it could be viewed across multiple browsers, Android and Apple devices.

As tablet adoption continues to grow at an astonishing rate, retailers need to cater to this new world of swiping and zooming. Those that can combine visual design and an engaging user experience with a full understanding of how consumers engage with your product or service stand to benefit the most.

Jim Anstey is the senior vice president of digital solutions at Group FMG.