In the recently concluded 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and National Retail Federation conference in New York, Microsoft demonstrated their vision for Smartstore. The demo included a socially enabled virtual dressing room application called Swivel by FaceCake which is powered by Kinect device. Swivel used Kinect camera to custom fit selected items for the person trying on and overlay them on their body. The demo also includes applications by other partners and shows great use of Microsoft Surface, Windows 7 based tablets and Windows Phone. Here’s a video.

Alexander Interactive, a leading New York-based e-commerce consultancy has released  a new report on Tablet-commerce which provides best practices for tablet-based UX design and t-commerce review of the ten largest retailers on the web.

The report goes into depth on how the top-selling sites on the internet (including Amazon, Staples, Apple, Dell, Wall Mart and Sears, among others) are adapting to a tablet-based future.  The analysis found that all of the top e-retailers suffered from usability problems and offered limited tablet shopping experiences in comparison to those retailers with dedicated tablet site experiences, such as Nike. Accordingly, the authors suggest that retailers seriously evaluate their investments for T-commerce web infrastructure, due to the explosion of tablet computer usage forecast in the coming years.

You can download the comprehensive report here.

Why Tablet Commerce May Trump Mobile Commerce

While all eyes in the online retail space seem to be on social networks and smartphones these days, we’re seeing an emerging trend with tablets that could be the most interesting of all. Only 9% 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. Not only that, but the ownership of the tablet device itself actually increases the amount of time that people spend online. And we’re anticipating a hockey stick in tablet adoption in the next five years on top of all that.