Wednesday’s long-awaited announcement that Amazon is entering the tablet game with their $199 Amazon Kindle Fire was an appropriate follow-up to news from earlier in the month ^[1] that the world’s largest Internet store (with revenue of $34 billion in 2010) was testing a major redesign of their website, in short optimizing the shopping experience for tablet devices.

Set to feature a bigger search bar, larger buttons and an emphasis on digital goods instead of physical ones, Amazon has not yet said when the new design will be ready for all consumers.

“Amazon is one of the few companies that sees significant e-commerce dollars,” notes Greg Sterling, an Internet and mobile analyst with San Francisco-based Internet2Go ^[2]—an Opus Research ^[3] advisory service. “Partly that’s about the brand and the trust they’ve built, but it’s also about usability and what they’ve done for shoppers. This is a chance for Amazon to capitalize on an opportunity to expand its brand and have the type of mindshare in mobile and tablets that really is unprecedented. It’s very forward-thinking, as they have typically been.”

But is it worth the investment? According to the latest International Data Corporation (IDC) research ^[4] released on September 12, “by 2015, more U.S. Internet users will access the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other wireline devices.” It also “forecasts that the impact of smartphone and, especially, media tablet adoption will be so great that the number of users accessing the Internet through PCs will first stagnate and then slowly decline. Western Europe and Japan will not be far behind the U.S. in following this trend.”

So should you redesign for the tablet and smartphone?

Read Inc.’s ^[5] break down of the evaluation process, why getting the design right is vital, how to measure cost and how to calculate ROI.