In last month’s newsletter we discussed survey results from our panel of over 5000 folks who have signed up to participate in research studies. The survey was specifically targeted at mobile phone use for web browsing and shopping. The topics we discussed were:
- What are visitors to shopping websites trying to accomplish there?
- What are people buying through their mobile phone?
If you’d like to review that newsletter, please visit http://www.usabilitysciences.com/node/355.
In this month’s newsletter we’d like to dive deeper into the shopping data to help you understand the demographic breakdowns of who is buying what and how much they are spending.
Let’s look at the demographics of gender, age, and household income of mobile buyers.
Looking at gender, there was no difference in purchase activity between men and women. 71% of males that have accessed shopping sites on the phone have also purchased at least once during the last 6 months vs. 70% of females.
In last month’s newsletter, we reported what categories mobile shoppers purchased through their phones. It is interesting to look at the breakdown of some of those purchase categories by gender:
As expected, females dominate the categories of beauty and clothing. Also interesting is the degree to which males dominate computer and consumer electronics. And, there is little difference in the mobile purchases of books, tickets, music, and travel between the genders.
Looking at age, here is the breakdown of those who purchased through their phone in the last 6 months:
Clearly, if your target demographic is in the 25-44 age range you want to have your site mobile optimized.
Looking at household income, here is the breakdown of those who purchased through their phone in the last 6 months:
The $50-$150k segment constitutes 72% of mobile purchasers.
We asked a survey question about where people are when they access websites through their phone. Specifically, we asked “For each location listed, approximately how often do you access websites on your mobile phone?”. The results were very interesting:
People hit websites through their phone when they have time to kill. Waiting included in line, at a restaurant, in a doctor’s office, at an airport, etc. Traveling included commuting.
We thought it might be interesting to see how much people were spending through their mobile phone. Here is the breakdown of what they spent making purchases online from their phone:
When we looked at the gender demographic across spending there was no significant difference between female and male spending. Since these figures include travel we wanted to see the picture without the potentially big ticket travel purchases. After we eliminated the travel purchases here’s how the picture changed:
The mobile spending amounts over $200 dropped from 52% of shoppers to 38%, showing that travel purchases impact that total spending number. When we looked at who was purchasing travel through their phone, 71% fell between the ages of 25 and 44 and the gender split was about even: 30% of males made travel purchases versus 25% of females.
The other purchase type we were particularly interested in was clothing. If you recall from last month’s newsletter, clothing was the 4th most popular purchase among mobile phone users, at 34%. So who is buying clothing through their phone?
The mobile clothing shopper is 77% female – probably no surprise. We wanted to drill a little deeper on this demographic.
- 50% of the female clothing shoppers own an iPhone; this makes it all the more important to ensure your clothing site is optimized for iPhone and should be taken into account if you're initially building a retail clothing mobile website and/or application
- 90% of females reported that they “always” or “often” access websites through their phone while “waiting” for something; so boredom is a primary driver of online mobile shopping
- 60% of females reported that they also have purchased beauty products through their phone in the last 6 months; this was the second most frequent product purchase category and should lead mobile clothing retailers to evaluate possible cross-sell opportunities if they have not already done so
- 71% of females were between the ages of 25 and 44
- 57% held a bachelors degree or higher
- 59% reported a household income of $50-$100k and 21% reported HHI of $100-$150k
So what can we take away from all this?
- First, if your target customer demographic falls into the sectors that report high mobile purchase activity you should probably be looking hard at mobile optimizing your site and potentially developing some mobile shopping apps.
- Waiting and traveling are the most frequent activities that trigger mobile website access and both of those can be suddenly interrupted. Make sure your mobile app or mobile site have a persistent cart.
- Along the same lines, consider a function that would allow a mobile shopper to return directly to where they were interrupted, similar to features you see on a DVR or DVD.
These are just a few ideas we have. We are sure the data will trigger other ideas for you, and we’d be interested in any “ah ha’s” that you could share with us in return. Our plan is to re-run this survey periodically to see how the mobile landscape is changing. We see it changing rapidly in our mobile usability testing projects but want to keep supplying you with data to document it.
Our next webinette is coming up June 15-16. The title: Establishing a Mobile Presence Enhances your Brand and Builds Customer Loyalty. We certainly hope you will join us.
