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Mobile Shoppers Spend 31 Minutes in a Store; 7% Leave Within 5 Minutes

More shoppers walking by are going into stores and, once inside, are spending more time there.

Of total foot traffic, about 1 in 10 consumers enter a store, based on the tracking of mobile phones in and around malls and stores.

And once inside the store, shoppers are spending 31 minutes, an increase from 26 minutes in the same month last year, according to the U.S. Retail Benchmark study, the monthly report on the tracking of tens of millions of shopping sessions by Euclid.

On the downside, overall traffic decreased 1% from a year ago, just as it did last month.

However, storefront conversions, the number of shoppers who enter a store as a percentage of the people walking by, increased to 9%, slightly up from last year, just as it did last month.

One of the more interesting insights I look for in these regular reports is how many shoppers who go into a store leave within five minutes, which the researchers refer to as bounce rate.

A month ago, the bounce rate was 9%, around the same as a year ago.

However, for March the bounce rate dropped from 10% last year to 7%, meaning that 7% of shoppers who enter a store leave within five minutes. This is a 12-month low in the monthly tracking study.

There was more not-so-good news for physical retailers. Repeat customers, those who come back to the same store more than once in a month, decreased to 11% from 13% a year ago.

In the trivia department, the best shopping day in the month was March 10 and the worst was March 5.

The volume of in-store shopping doesn’t mean mobile isn’t involved in things being bought.

For example, nearly half (47%) of all online commerce traffic comes from a smartphone or tablet, according to research from Demandware, which analyzed the actions of more than 100 million online shoppers.

So shoppers may be spending more time in stores, but many may have a better idea of what they’re looking for based on online research they already conducted.

And others are conducting that research from their phone while in the store.

 

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