Tag: smartphone shopping trends

A growing number of shoppers are using smartphones to buy products they want during the holiday season.

According to Google, a rising number of consumers are choosing to skip the long Black Friday marathon shopping experiences for small bursts of mobile commerce purchasing through the use of their smartphones.

These m-commerce purchases occur in scattered moments over time instead of all at once as is the Black Friday tradition.

Google has labeled these little bursts of mobile commerce shopping as “micro-moments”. In its blog, the company predicted that “This holiday season, shopping ‘moments’ will replace shopping ‘marathons,’.”

Approximately 54 percent of shoppers who will be making purchases this holiday season have said that they plan to do some of their shopping on their smartphones during periods of free time, such as while they are eating breakfast in the morning or during their daily commute, said Google. This data was generated through an analysis conducted between that company and Ipsos MediaCT from a consumer survey on their holiday season shopping behaviors.

The research showed that people would rather use mobile commerce and are less likely to take marathon in-person trips.

Last year, Google observed a steady increase in mobile shopping throughout the length of the holiday season and noted a decrease in the number of spikes on the traditionally preferred shopping days such as Black Friday morning.

The company explained in its blog that “This type of shopping has lead to shorter, more purposeful mobile shopping sessions.” It also went on to say that “In fact, while shoppers now spend 7% less time in each mobile session, smartphone’s share of online shopping purchases has gone up 64% over the last year, and 30% of all online shopping purchases now happen on mobile phones.”

Ahead of the Thanksgiving weekend, approximately 61 percent of holiday shoppers will already begin researching the products that they are thinking about buying. That is an increase of 17 percent over last year, despite the fact that Thanksgiving fell very late in the season in 2014. That said, Google still pointed out that while shoppers may start researching early, most purchases will still happen later on in the holiday season.

The results of a new survey have just been released and have shown that people don’t necessarily go out to buy.

PriceGrabber has just released the results of a mobile commerce survey that they conducted on the topic of back to school and which has provided some insight into consumer behaviors for making that type of purchase.

The research examined everything from where parents look for deals and what experience they enjoy most.

For example, the Pricegrabber survey indicated that mobile commerce is playing a very important role in back to school shopping this year. Sixty seven percent of the shoppers who took part in the survey indicated that they checked prices online before heading out to buy. Moreover, another 47 percent receive discount coupons over their smartphones via text message. Another 47 percent read emails containing discount offers while they are in-store.

Forty two percent of the survey participants use mobile commerce to make a purchase.

As fascinating and helpful as that mobile commerce data may be, there was one element of the survey that drew a larger amount of attention. There were 1,937 American shoppers who took part in this research by giving their opinions and sharing details regarding their shopping behaviors. What was interesting is that many of the smartphones and tablets were used from home either to make the purchase, or to research before heading out in the first place.

There is a large concern being expressed by owners of brick and mortar stores. This was that 46 percent of consumers with smartphones will use those shops as a “showroom”, so that they can see the product in real life, but then use mobile commerce to try to find a better price for the same product, somewhere else. This means that while they may window shop in store, they are actually buying while they’re online.

That said, the survey has indicated that those stores don’t need to worry about this threat from mobile commerce, as only 17 percent are actually using the devices while in store. This means that only a fraction of them are actually practicing showrooming and, among them, there is likely only to be an insignificant few who will find the product with a price and shipping total that will be low enough to make it worthwhile to wait to have it delivered instead of picking it up while they’re already there.