Commentary

The Mobile App & Shopper Happiness

After writing about how mobile commerce is an end-to-end experience (Mobile Shopping & the End-to-End Cycle) a few days ago, I came across an interesting piece of research that examines many of the components of this shopping behavior.

Rather than reviewing the whole gamut of retail shopping, researchers at GigaOm Pro looked specifically at behaviors of only smartphone owners.

By types of physical stores, at least by the measurement of extreme satisfaction, there’s a range of view. By category of store where smartphone owners are very happy:

  • 33% -- Membership warehouse clubs
  • 32% -- Discount stores
  • 30% -- Grocery stores
  • 27% -- Home improvement/hardware stores
  • 26% -- Drug stores
  • 18% -- Consumer electronics/appliance stores

As a general benchmark, the majority (52%) of smartphone owners are very happy with Amazon compared to about a quarter (27%) very happy with other online stores, so Amazon continues to be commerce king..

I found the insight on the use of mobile apps to be one of the more intriguing points in the study.

For consumers using mobile shopping apps by purpose, finding coupons is at the top of the list, as you might expect, followed by other reasons.

  • 28% -- Find coupons
  • 27% -- Compare prices
  • 25% -- Find upcoming events
  • 25% -- Get offers and deals
  • 20% -- Shop for gifts
  • 20% -- Compare products
  • 19% -- Check stock in stores
  • 19% -- Remember products to buy
  • 18% -- Keep up with new products
  • 16% -- Manage rewards earned

While many consumers access retail websites from their phones while they shop, this research indicates that merchants ignore apps at their own peril.

In virtually every category of shopping purpose, mobile app users were happier with their shopping experience than non-app users,

The obvious app development is to automate some of these functions and include them within the apps, which no doubt is being worked on.

Many of the functions already are available manually, such as price checking, coupon redemption and shopping lists.

Automating some of these functions can aid in the search for the friction-free mobile shopping experience.

__________________________________________________

OMMA mCommerce, July 15, New York. Autotrader.com, IHG, MasterCard, BBDO, Rapp, Joule, ScanBuy, Huge, Spyderlynk, Rue La La, BYNDL, Catalina, Giant Eagle, Payvia, Ansible, Moxie Interactive coming. Here’s the AGENDA.

4 comments about "The Mobile App & Shopper Happiness".
Check to receive email when comments are posted.
  1. Grant Bergman from SurveyConcierge.com • GrantBergman.com, July 8, 2013 at 1:28 p.m.

    It would be nice not to have to sign up for a GigaOm Pro subscription just to look into the research report. (That's $299 with credit card info required – the much hated negative select option – just to access the "free" 7 day trial required.) They turn the author of this article into a shill for their service.

  2. Chuck Martin from Chuck Martin, July 8, 2013 at 1:47 p.m.

    Thanks for the nice catch, Grant. Thought it was a link to the entire study (for free) that I had. The link has been removed.

  3. Jeremy Geiger from Retailigence, July 8, 2013 at 11:21 p.m.

    With more consumers turning to apps for a better mobile shopping experience, it’s important for retailers to make sure their products and stores are featured in the top 3rd party mobile shopping applications. Making their store-level availability information accessible to these shoppers is an added bonus – both a strong call to action (especially when paired with a map to the nearest store location) and useful information to the growing percentage of shoppers who want to check local inventory levels before going to the store (as high as the number of shoppers that want a coupon, according to some other studies).

  4. Chuck Martin from Chuck Martin, July 9, 2013 at 10:50 a.m.

    Good point, Jeremy. No sense having a consumer go to a store to find the product they want out of stock.

Next story loading loading..

Discover Our Publications