Rakuten deals with bad reviews of the Kobo Touch by deleting them

The Digital Reader reports that Rakuten's launch of the Kobo Touch in Japan isn't going quite as expected. Despite the company's "Kill Amazon" chest-beating a few weeks ago, actual customers aren't thrilled about the Kobo Touch eReader. Reviews on the website gave the eReader an average rating of 2.96 out of 5, and reviews were fairly equally split between four stars and one star. I'm using the past tense because Rakuten took the entire review page off its website. Reviews of the eReader complained about "...crashing setup of kobo desktop application, very limited offer of Japanese books, unresponsive touch screens, poor customer service, etc."

To be fair, the Kobo Touch has only been on sale in Japan for a week, and there are almost always problems at launch. However, the Kobo Touch isn't a new product--it's been shipping for more than a year. Rakuten may have believed that its dominance of the Japanese eCommerce market would allow it to quickly build comparable dominance of the country's eBook market. However, if they don't fix the problems with the Japanese-language Kobo Touch quickly, what's more likely is that they'll either kill the domestic eBook market or hand it to Amazon.

Tablets now generate more eCommerce traffic than smartphones

As more evidence that tablets are overtaking smartphones as devices of preference for mobile Internet users, GigaOm reports on a new study of more than 100 million online shopping transactions by Monetate. The company determined that tablets represented 6.52% of traffic to eCommerce sites in Q1 2012, overtaking smartphones (with 5.35%) for the first time. Tablet traffic increased 348% in the last year, while smartphone traffic increased 117%. 95% of the tablet traffic was from iPads. These numbers compare with a forecast from Adobe that overall tablet traffic worldwide won't exceed that from smartphones until early 2013, and will represent 10% of website traffic in early 2014. GigaOm suggests that the reason for the difference between Monetate and Adobe is that Monetate measures eCommerce traffic, while Adobe is counting all traffic, including traffic to content sites.

Tablets are also much more efficient at converting sales than smartphones: In Q1, visits from PCs converted into sales 3.51% of the time, while visits from tablets converted at a 3.23% rate, and visits from smartphones converted at a 1.39% rate. Other measures, such as pages viewed per session and items added to carts, are also much closer between PCs and tablets than between either PCs or tablets and smartphones. The reasons most likely are the bigger displays and keyboards on tablets.