• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, December 30, 2014

The mobile coupon crowd is looking for deals.

Consistent with overall mobile users, most of those with a coupon app will be looking for discounts and deals next year, based on a new study.

The 2015 Mobile Retail Outlook Survey was conducted by Survey Monkey for mobile couponing app company Shopular and comprised a survey of 600 U.S. smartphone owners who used the app sometime in the past.

In what might be a bit of good news for retailers, a large majority (88%) of these shoppers plan to do the same amount or more shopping in 2015 than they did this year.

Understandably, since this is a survey of mobile coupon app users, more than three fourths (77%) of them have purchased physical goods via a mobile app within the past year, though the rest (23%) have never made a purchase through an app.

However, more mobile shoppers seem to be comfortable using their phones to buy through websites, with 86% of them making a purchase that way during the past year.

Retailers regularly find their customers gravitating more to their mobile websites rather than to their apps for commerce.

Consistent with the demographics of Shopular users, 85% of those surveyed plan to shop for women’s clothing in the next year, the top category, which was followed by children’s clothing (55%), men’s clothing (48%) and housewares (40%).

Numerous studies have shown that the large majority of consumers prefer to shop in stores. Those studies generally include the surveying of all consumers or perhaps smartphone owners.

This survey interested me since it was of those who have used a mobile coupon app, providing a view of an active mobile shopping subset of the overall marketplace.

While more than half (64%) of those surveyed plan to do the bulk of their retail purchasing in a physical store next year, this is nowhere near the range of 90% we usually see.

The point is that the mobile shopping marketplace is hardly homogeneous.

For example, fewer than half (45%) of smartphone owners use shopping apps daily or weekly, while 18% use them only monthly and more than a third (37%) use them less than once a month or not at all, according to a study by Apigee Institute, which I wrote about here last month.

And not all consumers use their phones to shop. Slightly fewer consumers (49%) planned to use mobile to holiday shop this year compared to just over half (51%) last year, according to the American Express Spending and Savings Tracker study.

With the addition of many new mobile devices unwrapped at Christmas, more consumers can be expected to try mobile shopping apps.

Looking at those already using them may provide a clue in what to expect.

When asked what their New Year’s shopping resolution is for 2015, the majority (59%) of the coupon app users said it was to shop more with the aid of technology-enabled discounts and deals.

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