Consumers likelier to browse than buy via mobile: Study

By Giselle Abramovich

February 25, 2008

Hung LeHong is research vice president at Gartner

Retailers developing a business-to-consumer mobile phone strategy must enable a multichannel shopping process as well as drive mobile commerce revenue.

A new study from market researcher Gartner Inc. found that because technology in the mobile commerce arena is improving, retailers plan to start thinking about adding the medium to their business in the next year or two. In order to drive mobile commerce, retailers and vendors must consider how far consumers are willing to shop using their handsets.

“The implication this study has for retailers considering mobile is that the mobile shopping experience needs to be multichannel,” said Hung LeHong, research vice president at Gartner, Stamford, CT.

“Someone using their phone in the car to browse products should be able to press a button and then continue their shopping experience at home at the computer," he said.

“Consumers want to use their mobile phone for gathering information related to shopping, such as store information and product-related information. Retailers are investing too much into sales closure on the phone and not enough into the mobile shopping experience.”

To generate insights for this particular survey, Gartner questioned more than 2,000 consumers in the United States and Britain on the likelihood that they would undertake a variety of mobile shopping activities, from price checking and product browsing to ordering and paying for a product from a mobile phone.

Gartner found that consumers are more likely to shop than to buy from a mobile phone.

In the U.S., consumers were twice are twice as likely to check for prices of items as to buy items from their mobile phone, with 24 percent likely to check price and 12 percent likely to buy on a mobile phone. With British consumers, 18 percent were likely to check price and 11 percent were likely to buy.

Also, the study found that the U.S. is ranked third in the world with regard to openness to receiving promotions on a mobile phone. Britain was ranked fourth.

Age seems to be the determinant of mobile behavior, as younger consumers ages 18-24 are more likely to use their handsets to conduct retail activities. These respondents were, on average, 1.98 times more likely to undertake mobile shopping activities than the boomer generation respondents ages 43-61.

In Britain younger consumers were on average 2.63 times more likely to do mobile shopping activities than their boomer counterparts.

British consumers are more conservative in stating their likelihood to use the mobile phone to shop, but the relative ranking of the preferred activities was very similar to U.S. consumers. However, younger consumers in Britain were 7 percent more aggressive in stating their likelihood to do mobile shopping activities than those in the U.S. 

"Focusing solely on driving mobile commerce revenue will not deliver what customers are really looking for when using their mobile phones during the shopping process," Mr. LeHong said.