Wireless carrier Sprint released the results of an online survey of 473 Americans today that revealed some interesting things about mobile-use in holiday shopping. Before I show you the stats, I should mention that the survey respondents were skewed a little in favor of the female–56 percent female, 44 percent male, and a margin of error of +/- 4.51 percent. Nevertheless I think the split is close enough to make the statistics significant. Of the survey respondents, 33 percent use their mobile phones to save money when holiday shopping. Of those 33 percent,
- 72 percent save money by calling a friend
- 35 percent use their phones to tag pictures of price tag and product features for later comparison
- 26 percent call other retailers for comparison pricing
- 22 percent check prices on the mobile web
- 12 percent use their phones to look for similar retailers in the area
- 11 percent call from in-store to ask for a price discount
- 6 percent used a mobile coupon
- 1 percent use a mobile shopping application like Slifter
The majority of the survey results were focused on things like cutting landlines and switching carriers to save money, but I found the mobile shopping results of interest because I never would have thought of some of those uses–especially calling a store while you’re in it to ask for a price discount! Furthermore, the fact that so few people seem to use mobile coupons or mobile shopping applications seems to speak of a huge market opportunity here. With the power of the iPhone and other operating systems like Android, it wouldn’t be out of the question to put together an application or platform that would meet all of the “needs” listed above. Add location awareness to the mix, and there’s a huge amount of money to be made. I won’t be surprised if holiday season 2009 is the tipping point for mass market location-aware shopping applications.
You can read Sprint’s survey results here with charts and everything. Just be warned it’s a PDF file.
(Image Credit: s2art)
