Smartphone Owners Spending More Via Mobile But Repelled By Poor Site Functionality
By Anna Johnson on January 6th, 2010Compete’s quarterly Smartphone Intelligence survey shows that smartphone owners are more comfortable than ever buying from their handsets but many are repelled by poor mobile site functionality.
Given that Compete’s research also indicates that mobile commerce (m-commerce) will explode in 2010, marketers wanting to capitalize on mobile sales may need to revamp their websites to make them not just mobile friendly, but m-commerce friendly.
Among Compete’s key findings from its Q3 2009 Smartphone Intelligence survey of smartphone owners are that:
- 37 percent of smartphone owners have bought a non-mobile product or service using their smartphone handset in the past 6 months.
- 19 percent have bought music using their smartphone, whilst 14 percent have purchased books, DVDs, or video games and 12 percent have purchased movie tickets.
- Android and Blackberry mobile device owners tend to be bigger spenders than iPhone owners… or, at least, more willing to spend larger amounts. 40 percent of Android owners and 51 percent of Blackberry owners said they would spend $500 or more to buy a product from their mobile phone, compared to 9 percent of iPhone owners.
- The most popular mobile shopping-related activity is research related, with 41 percent of iPhone users and 43 percent of Android users most likely to check sale prices at alternative locations from their mobile phones whilst shopping.
- The second most popular activity is accessing consumer reviews, with 39 percent of iPhone owners and 31 percent of Android owners accessing reviews from their handset before they purchase.
- Smartphone users are more likely to abandon transactions on sites that are not optimized for mobile purchasing, with 8 percent of smartphone owners who tried buying product on their device unable to do so, 45 percent of those abandoning purchases because the site would not load, and another 38 percent leaving sites because they were not developed specifically for smartphone users.
