Mobile payments more popular among tablet owners, research shows

Tablets appear to be the wild card in the burgeoning mobile commerce market, according to a study conducted by analysis firm Forrester Research.

Despite accounting for a minute portion of the mobile shopping market, at just 9 percent, tablet owners appear to be the most active mobile shoppers. Forrester analysts Sucharity Mulpuru and Sarah Rotman Epps wrote a report based on their research, titled Why Tablet Commerce May Trump Mobile Commerce, which predicts tablets will bring the mobile sector into the mainstream of ecommerce.

"Only 9 percent of web shoppers now have tablet devices, but here’s the big deal -- most of those people already own smartphones (as well as PCs, of course), and they are saying that they actually prefer to use their tablets for shopping," Mulpuru wrote in a Forrester Research blog post. "Not only that, but the ownership of the tablet device itself actually increases the amount of time that people spend online."

Mulpuru pointed to portability, richer content and larger screen size than smartphones as the main features prompting tablet users to use the device for shopping purposes.

Tablets may also be a significant contributor to growth in the overall mobile payments sector. PayPal recently increased its estimate for total mobile payments in 2011 to $3 billion, up from the $2 billion prediction the company made just four months earlier.