IFR: Tablet Selection Grows Dramatically In Online Stores

By Joseph Palenchar On Dec 19 2011 - 6:01am

NEW YORK — The selection of tablets available through online retailers shot up beginning in June as more tablet models began hitting the market, but only 10 brands accounted for 71 percent of the 49 tablet brands appearing in online stores, IFR Monitoring found in tracking web-store product selections. (See table 1.)

Similarly, only 10 online dealers accounted for 79 percent of the tablets sold by the 22 online stores found by IFR to be selling tablets during the Jan. through October 2011 period. (See table 2.)

The numbers in the accompanying charts represent the number of times each month that tablets bearing a specific brand name appeared in each of the 22 on-line stores that IFR monitors for its tablet study, a spokesperson said. IFR checks each website once each week, capturing each model once per audit. If a specific model appeared in each weekly audit on a specific web site, the number of its appearances in a given month is counted as four or five, depending on the number of weeks in that month.

Among the tablets sold online, Apple accounted for more tablets appearing on online stores than any other tablet brand during the 10-month period. The other brands appearing most often in online store shelves, in order, were Archos, Samsung, Acer, Asus, Toshiba, Coby, ViewSonic, BlackBerry and — to round out the top 10 — Nextbook (E-Fun).

Those were followed in order by Velocity, Motorola, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

The online store that placed tablets on its site more often during the 10-month period was Amazon, followed by Best Buy, TigerDirect, Walmart and Circuit City. Next came, in order, Insight, Fry’s, Buy.com, Newegg and Sears to round out the top 10 of 22 online stores tracked.

IFR Monitoring, owned by the GfK Group, specializes in research on the technical consumer goods in more than 60 countries. IFR tracks shelf share, print-ad share and web-ad share to “reflect what is actually in the eyes of the consumer,” the company said.