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Top1. Introduction
Tablet, a content consumption device emerged with a surge adoption to substitute laptops, complement smartphones and play an additional supplementary role in mobile commerce globally (Lee, Lee and Chan-Olmsted 2017). Conversion of consumers to online shoppers is one of the tactics of online retailers to engage customers and drive more sales while shoppers are on their websites. To have a consistent conversion of online visitor to a potentially loyal customer, there is a need to know the trait and cultural differences of online shoppers with a tablet. Chen, (2013) study reveals how culture impact tablet sharing across individualistic and collectivistic culture based on domestication approach and discovered ages, locations, and situations as the key themes that drive how people interact with a tablet. The speed of the change in the mobile technology industry is creating an opportunity for online retailers to use trendy computer devices to track customer’s changing purchasing behaviour and to enhance online retailer’s strategy and business model. Advanced technology like the tablet is impacting mobile commerce lifecycle from pre-purchase, purchase to post-purchase activities, thus, and making m-commerce a scalable business (Shankar, Kleijnen, Ramanathan, Rizley, Holland, and Morrissey, 2016).
Tablet commerce is now an offshoot of m-commerce, and it is “any transaction completed on a tablet device in which a payment is rendered through the device either through a retailer’s website, through a proprietary ‘app’, or through some swipe device attached to a tablet” (Forrester 2011, pp.15). There is a limitation to this definition, and the conceptualization of tablet commerce is still at its formative stage. This study defines a tablet device in the context of m-commerce as a multitasking device that emerged to substitute the obsolete technology, complement existing mobile device and supplement the m-commerce strategy of an online retailer.
To the best of our knowledge, studies are scarce on cross-cultural contexts in the domain of tablet research, however, extant studies only cover cross-national study within developed countries (Jin, Park and Kim (2008). Other related studies are the impact of a tablet on human behavior with ethnography for communities - interpretive research method (Burford and Park 2014). Also studied is tablet use prediction – focusing on the gratification of tablet use with telephone survey (Leung and Zhang 2016) and impact of a tablet on digital commerce with experiment (Xu et al. 2016). Lee, Lee, and Chan-Olmsted (2017) also evaluated tablet diffusion with secondary data set; tablet apps with structural equation modeling - SEM (Kim and Kim 2016); tablet usage in the context of underdeveloped primary schools with Chi-square test and correlation (Pruet, Ang, and Farzin, 2016); impact of m-business with mixed-method approach (Picoto, Bélanger and Palma-dos-Reis 2014). All these studies emphasized the importance and challenges of a tablet as a medium of online shopping engagement between the online retailer and the consumers.