Shopping? You’re probably using your phone to help

We all know that the holiday shopping season can be a lot of things: expensive, fun, stressful and others. Whatever you were feeling during the holiday shopping season, there’s a decent chance you were using a cell phone or smartphone during the process, according to new data from Pew Internet.

The report found that 52 percent of U.S. adults used their cell phone in a certain manner while shopping. This includes calling a friend to ask about a product, looking up a product online or looking up reviews of the product. The breakdown looks like this:

• 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

Using mobiles to augment shopping is a very interesting topic to me because it has the potential to be very harmful or helpful to traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Companies like Amazon are pushing promotions which encourage users to go into a store to price check it and then buy it online. Is that what a lot of people are doing?

Well, the Pew Internet numbers suggest that if you’re going to use a phone to look up reviews of a product, you’ll also look up the pricing (or vice versa). Among these people, 37 percent decided not to purchase the product at all, 19 percent purchased the product online and 37 percent decided not to purchase the product at all. It wouldn’t surprise me to see that number rise in the future.

But brick-and-mortar stores don’t have to fear mobile technology entirely, as those same numbers said that 35 percent purchased the product at the store after looking up reviews and prices online. Utilizing apps like shopkick or teaming with eBay for boosting the in-store experience can help retailers create a better connection with their shoppers.

[Via Pew Internet, photo via Shutterstock, Yuri Arcurs]