Most shoppers use a mobile app to browse before they buy

A recent survey has shown that apps play an important role in m-commerce decision making.

The results of a new survey that was conducted by Apptentive have shown that most shoppers will browse through at least one retail mobile app before they actually head out to a brick and mortar shop to purchase the item they have been considering.

The survey involved the participation of 350 people, and was held in July 2015 regarding shopping habits.

What the survey showed was that when consumers were considering making a purchase, many of them would turn to a mobile app, or several applications, to help them through the decision making portion of their purchasing experience. The data leaned heavily to the side of using mobile technology when retail shopping was involved.

The survey showed 88 percent of shoppers used a mobile app from one of their favorite retailers.

It also revealed that 61 percent of the participants said that they had used those mobile apps within the month prior to having participated in the survey. A smaller number of the respondents, 26 percent, said that they used their retail apps on a regular basis – that is, 7 or more times per month.

Overall, the mobile device users would look to their apps to help them to prepare to head out and go shopping. They would usually have finished using those applications ahead of actually arriving at the brick and mortar shop. Apptentive called the behavior “app-rooming”, as 71 percent would use the application as a kind of digital showroom, to look through the specifications of a product before actually heading over to look at the physical item that they wished to purchase. Those shoppers conducted this app-rooming behavior at least one time every month.

Once they actually reached the stores, they would still use the mobile app, but not quite as much. Just slightly more than half of the respondents to the survey had used retail apps while they were actually within the store itself. Still, over half is a highly significant proportion of the customers that make their way into a store on any given day.