Tablets driving more e-commerce sites than smartphones, says report

The number of online shoppers now accessing e-commerce websites by tablet has increased by 348 per cent over the past year.

Some 6.52 per cent of online shoppers now access e-commerce websites by tablet, while only 5.35 per cent visit on phones, according to a new report by marketing tech company Monetate.

This is a 348 per cent increase in tablet traffic over the past year, while smartphones saw a growth of 117 per cent by comparison.

Monetate believes that tablet traffic will hit double figures of the total percentage by this year's "holiday season". Traffic peaked in the US, says the company, at 7.1 per cent from tablets during Black Friday [the day after Thansgiving] and bargain-tastic follow-up Cyber Monday.

Monetate says that a tablet's larger interface encourages full-blown "shopping and browsing", while a smartphone will be increasingly reduced to the status of a "reference device", as customers use them more in-store for price checking or seeing products that are directly linked from emails.

More stats in the report reveal that tablets are catching up with PCs in terms of browse-to-purchase percentages. Typically, says Monetate, 3.51 per cent of PC-using e-shoppers end up making a purchase, and tablet traffic now follows closely behind at 3.23 per cent. For mobile phones, the figure is 1.39 per cent.

Monetate believes tablets will see an even more significant rise in future as more consumer websites begin to tailor their experiences for tablet users.

Some 95 per cent of the tablet traffic surveyed came from iPads.