Special from Multichannel Merchant.
The iPhone has made the mobile Web accessible to more users. Halley Silver, director of online services at baking products merchant King Arthur Flour, considers the iPhone was a game-changer for most merchants in terms of going mobile.
Silver says about 75% of the mobile browsers detected in its analytics are from iPhones. And about 15% of those devices are actually coming from Apple's newest creation, the iPad, the hybrid laptop-touch screen device for mobile use.
And with Apple announcing that it sold 1 million iPads just 20 days after its April 3 release, Michelle Eichner, vice president of e-mail products for Pivotal Veracity, thinks merchants need to keep it on their radar.
"The enthusiasm surrounding the iPad is impressive, and companies have been scrambling to release iPad-ready applications," Eichner says. "If a company can gauge a real mobile audience, then it wouldn’t hurt to create a unique iPad-ready mobile application as part of its mobile commerce strategy."
But is the iPad going to change the m-commerce game the same way the iPhone did? Not yet, says Julie Ask, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.
Read the rest of the story at Multichannel Merchant.