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Miva Merchant, a leading supplier of e-commerce software, offers online merchants some useful tips for optimizing their websites for shoppers. In a new ecommerce infographic, Miva Merchant demonstrates the growth of tablet usage and gives useful information to merchants interested in capturing tablet-based sales.
"The number of tablet users has exploded," says Jesse Ness at Miva Merchant. Consumer demand for tablet devices isn't expected to cool at all in the next 18-24 months. "Consumers clearly prefer the tablet shopping experience to one delivered by a desktop computer or even another mobile device. They demonstrate this in their shopping and spending habits."
Jesse says that simple changes, like using a simplified and optimized checkout process, can help boost the consumer's shopping experience. This produces increased sales and more customer contact at a low overall cost. Jesse also says that besides being more cost-effective, tablet-based modifications are easy to implement and deliver a more pleasant shopping experience for all website visitors.
"We advise our clients to simplify because consumers who are committed to making a purchase are looking for speed, simplicity, and confidence in the shopping experience. Simplifying a site using our shopping cart software may include using a reduced color palette, a reduced number of pages, a secure, hosted shopping cart, simpler and smaller graphics that load fast, easy-to-read fonts, avoiding Flash animations, and building a strong checkout process that boosts the customer's overall confidence in the merchant."
The new approach may be difficult for some established online merchants to accept. "A lot of merchants have developed online stores that try to deliver an 'in-store experience,' but website designs that work for a desktop shopper tend to discourage a tablet-based consumer." Jesse says that optimizing for the tablet visitor will "improve customer satisfaction, reduce shopping-cart abandonment and ultimately encourage users to complete the sale."
"There's no doubt about the coming impact of tablet-based computing," says Jesse. "Merchants who want to succeed online must develop a tablet-based sales strategy to reach this prime customer base."
See more tablet shopper data in this ecommerce infographic.