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Only 2 years old, the Apple iPad has already become the most popular mobile device used by consumers to make payments to online sellers, according to research released on Monday. The iPad, larger than a smart phone but smaller, thinner, and lighter than a laptop, accounted for 3.6% of all payments processed by Adyen Inc., an Amsterdam-based gateway provider with a U.S. operation it started early in 2010. The company says that’s more than the share commanded by the iPhone (3%) and by Android-powered smart phones (1.5%).
Adyen measured results over an eight-month period from November 2011 through June.
Besides accounting for more transactions, the iPad also apparently induces higher spending. Adyen reports consumers spent on average 20% more per transaction on iPads than they did on any other mobile device.
The iPad’s remarkable rise as a payments device mirrors a similarly rapid ascent for mobile devices overall. Some 8.4% of all payments to online merchants globally in June originated from a handset or tablet, Adyen reports, compared to 3.6% in late 2011.
Four markets in particular are driving this growth, including daily-deal sites, online games, ticketing operations, and location-based services, according to Roelant Prins, chief commerce officer at Adyen. Daily-deal sites, for example, now account for 12.6% of all Adyen transactions stemming from a mobile device, the company says. Online retailers in general account for 7.2% of mobile transactions, according to the research.
The company doesn’t speculate on the cause of the iPad’s sudden popularity, but Prins says in a statement that “there is clearly a consumer appetite to embrace mobile devices, in particular tablets such as the iPad, and merchants have started to listen.”
The news about the Adyen research comes as iPads are also figuring more prominently among physical-world merchants as well, not to mention for daily-deal operations like Groupon Inc. For example, Chicago-based Groupon in May acquired Breadcrumb, a New York City startup whose software lets restaurants run transactions on iPads.
Founded in 2006 by former executives from Bibit, a European gateway acquired by Royal Bank of Scotland two years earlier, Adyen opened operations in the U.S. in the spring of 2010. Hoping to serve U.S. online merchants seeking to reach overseas customers, the North American operation began by selling its links to foreign payments systems and by touting a pricing plan that features interchange-plus pricing. With this pricing plan, merchants pay the published network rate for a given country along with a stated mark up from Adyen. Generally speaking, gateways funnel transactions to back-end processors, while also running fraud-control routines to weed out dodgy transactions.
