According to a recent global study conducted by Adyen, the payment processor company with headquarters in Amsterdam, consumers increasingly prefer to make high cost acquisitions with their tablets rather than their smartphones.
The reason seems go beyond the obvious one of screen size, affirmed Kamran Zaki, the president of Adyen North America who expanded the study to a global level. The result is that the smartphone is preferred by 80% of users for the initial phase of an acquisition research, which, however, in 80% of cases is then made by a tablet that is easier to use and to insert data, thus providing a sense of a reduced error margin and increased security. Clearly, the advantage of using a tablet over a PC is it islighter and absolutely mobile.
This study by Adyen makes up only a part of a larger report that the company elaborates annually and includes the Adyen Mobile Payments Index. The study covers five different verticals by analyzing transactions that occur in each area: travel, digital goods, online games, the retail world, and ticketing.
Therefore, for mobile payments a reference must be made, not only for payments made in the physical world, but also those made through mobile browsers and within applications.
In 2013, Adyen counted on its own platform a total of 14 billion dollars in value for online transactions, of which 2.2 billion via mobile made by 3,500 clients on sites like Groupon, TomTom, KLM, Vodafone, Badoo, SoundCloud.
The index showed that while the value of the transaction is higher on a tablet, the number of transactions of smaller sums is higher on smartphones, which reveals it is an ideal instrument for, above all, impulse buys. The only segment where the PC still reigns is for travel, possibly because trips are often organized with other people and the quickness or mobility of an acquisition is not as important.
For travel, the average transaction value was 131 euros from PC versus 89 euros spent on average from tablets, and 44 euros from smartphones. Nevertheless, even in these segments, when volume is scrutinized, 30% of transactions are made on smartphones and tablets and the trend is in continuous growth.
Digital goods and online games are clearly the top acquisitions on mobiles, with over 45% of transactions made with mobile devices. An increasing number of retailers are investing in the optimization of mobile payment functions on their websites in order to keep up with the increasing demand for mobile payment options.
Within this scenario it is interesting to note that mobile commerce will become and, to some degree already is, another battle in the Android VS iOS war. According to the Adyen study, the Apple platform is still the most popular for mobile payments. iPad counts about 41% of total transactions, followed by iPhone with 31.6%.
In the Android world, there is a net preference for smartphones rather than tablets that counts only 6.6% of acquisition versus 20% for the mobile phones. But just as is occurring with sales, in mobile commerce as well the gap between iOS and Android is slowly diminishing and there could soon be a neck and neck race, which makes it hard to determine who will be the final victor.
