Women, young people and ethnic minorities will do most mobile shopping

Mobile phone users will be taking advantage of their devices en masse this holiday season to aid the multichannel shopping experience, building up their mobile shopping habit for the year to come. According to Google, 78% of smartphone users are at least somewhat likely to download or use a mobile app for holiday shopping, with price comparison the biggest draw.

A survey by mobile marketing agency Briabe Media of mobile users in the MocoSpace mobile social networking audience found that a similar 76% of respondents considered their phone at least somewhat important for their holiday shopping this year.

Women placed a greater weight on using their phone for holiday shopping, with more than a third saying it was very important, compared with 28% of men.

Importance of Their Mobile Phone to Holiday Shopping This Season According to US Mobile Internet Users, by Gender, Dec 2010 (% of respondents)

Mobile shopping habits also split across racial and ethnic lines. Asian, black and Hispanic respondents were all at least 12 percentage points more likely than whites to place any importance on their phone for shopping. The differences were even more dramatic among respondents who classified their phone as very important: 40% of black respondents said so, compared with just 24% of whites.

US Mobile Internet Users Who Say that Their Mobile Phone Is Important to Holiday Shopping This Season, by Race/Ethnicity, Dec 2010 (% of respondents)

Age had a smaller effect on results, with teenagers predictably more interested in mobile shopping. But with 79% of teens saying their phone was at least somewhat important, they were not too far ahead of adults over 30, 74% of whom said the same.

The top use of mobile phones was for product or pricing information before the shopper entered a store (62%); fewer respondents did comparison shopping on their phone while they were in a retail outlet (46%).

SOURCE eMarketer

One thought on “Who Relies Most on Smartphones for Shopping?”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *