Coding for Tablets: Another Fork in the Road for Website Developers?

You can use affordable web hosting from midPhase to drive down costs and implement a robust server platform, but you still need to keep your eye on how clients interact with your products and the devices they use to ultimately make a purchase.
For this reason, a recent digital marketing insight from Adobe reveals an interesting piece of information regarding how the mobile revolution will shape future online purchases.
Adobe analyzed the 2011 online transactions of more than 140 U.S. retailers which when tallied up amounted to over 16.2 billion transactions.
If you have heard of the term Big Datathis is it! Once their engineers had done the number crunching it emerged that Tablet Visitors were the pearls worth fighting for.
In one calendar month of 2011, the Christmas period, Tablet Visitors spent over 50% more per purchase and were nearly three times more likely to purchase than Smartphone visitors.
From all accounts, it appears that Tablet Visitors are the big spenders in the mobile sector pushing up Black Friday and Cyber Monday averages by as much as 16% over 2010 levels.
Quite obviously, product research is easier, more streamlined and attractive to Tablet users than those using phones.? In retrospect, this finding seems obvious, but still, these numbers back it up!
There are a few reasons for this development, said Adobe.
?Tablet Visitors are more affluent than other online shoppers and tend to be males.
12% of the U.S. Internet population, or 28 million consumers, own a tablet. Tablet owners skew toward 18- to 34-year-old males and come from households with above average incomes: 29% have an annual household income greater than $75,000.?
The second reason playing into the rise of the Tablet Buyer, is the environment in which the Tablet is used, often less stressful than its Smartphone counterpart.
?Adobe’s analysis shows that 34% of Tablet Visitors shopped on the weekends, compared with 24% and 27% for Traditional and Smartphone Visitors, respectively.

So, what should you do about this?
According to Adobe, these are the key takeaways:

• Don?t develop your website for a general Smartphone market. You will need to cascade your presentation and store displays for separate devices. Oh boy does this not remind one of the browser wars and separate coding for IE and Netscape?

• Tablet Visitors, said Adobe, respond favorably to promotions and deals. Thus, any online incentive should have a Tablet-specific feel to it, to bait Tablet Visitors.

If you are currently coding your site separately for Tablet specific users let us know!