How Americans Use Their Phones to Assist With Purchasing Decisions
Image : DiverseImages
More than half of adult cell phone owners used their cell phones while they were in a store during the 2011 holiday season to seek help with purchasing decisions. During a 30 day period before and after Christmas:
- 38% of cell owners used their phone to call a friend while they were in a store for advice about a purchase they were considering making
- 24% of cell owners used their phone to look up reviews of a product online while they were in a store
- 25% of adult cell owners used their phones to look up the price of a product online while they were in a store, to see if they could get a better price somewhere else
Taken together, just over half (52%) of all adult cell owners used their phone for at least one of these three reasons over the holiday shopping season and one third (33%) used their phone specifically for online information while inside a physical store—either product reviews or pricing information.
Detailed findings—online product reviews and calling friends for purchasing advice
There are a number of demographic patterns in these survey findings. Specifically:
- Cell owners ages 18-49 are significantly more likely to use their phones for online product reviews than are cell owners ages 50 and older. Cell owners ages 65 and older are especially unlikely to do this—just 4% did so this holiday season.
- 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.
- Non-white cell owners are more likely than white cell owners to look up online product reviews, and those who have attended college are more likely to do so than those who have not.
