38% of Cellphone Owners Called a Friend for Purchase Advice While in a Store During the Holidays
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that more than half of U.S. adult cellphone owners used their cellphone during the holiday shopping season for one of three reasons: to call a friend, to look up reviews of a product online and to look up the price of a product online while they were in a store.
According to Pew, 38 percent of cellphone owners used their phones to call a friend for advice about a purchase they were considering making while they were in a store. Meanwhile, 25 percent used their cellphones to look up the price of a product online while they were in a store to see if they could get a better deal somewhere else, and 24 percent used their phones to look up reviews of a product online while they were in a store.
Altogether, 52 percent of adult cellphone owners in the U.S. used their mobile phone for at least one of the above three reasons during the 2011 holiday season; while 33 percent used their phone specifically for online information while inside a physical store, either for product reviews or pricing information.
Pew broke down its findings by demographics and found that cellphone owners between the ages of 18 and 49 were notably more likely to use their phones for online product reviews than cellphone owners ages 50 and older.
“Urban and suburban cell owners are roughly twice as likely as rural cell owners to have recently used their phone to look up online reviews of a product they found in a physical store,” according to the report.
Also, non-white cellphone owners are more likely (53 percent) than white cellphone owners (45 percent) to look up online product reviews on their phones. Also, those with at least some college education are more likely to do this than those a high-school education or less.
Household income didn’t have a significant effect, as 50 percent of households earning $50,000+ per year looked up product reviews online or called a friend for advice about a purchase, while 48 percent of households earning less than $50,000 did the same.
When it came to real-time price matching, 31 percent of men participated and 20 percent of women did the same.
Separate numbers from Zmags show that 87 percent of U.S. consumers prefer shopping on a website via a PC/laptop, while 71 percent prefer shopping in an actual store. Meanwhile, 14 percent prefer shopping on a website via a smartphone, 9 percent on a website via a tablet, 7 percent via a phone call with a service agent, 4 percent via a tablet app and 4 percent via a smartphone app.
Sources:
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/In-store-mobile-commerce/Findings.aspx
