Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The holidays are almost upon us, and recent surveys confirm what many business owners have suspected: social commerce, and the use of mobile channels, is increasing and will have a huge impact on 2014 holiday shopping behaviors. The shift toward social shopping highlights trends that impact both business-to-consumer and business-to-business (B2B) purchasing.

As reported by MarketingLand, mobile and social channels will play a significant role in holiday shopping this year. In an online survey of 1,000 smartphone owners, sponsored by MarketLive.com, one in three shoppers stated they plan to make more than 50 percent of purchases via mobile devices. Thirty percent of respondents reported having made a purchase as a direct result of “engagement with a social networking site” within the past year. This is up from 18 percent the previous year.

And, as consumers become increasingly web and mobile-savvy, and vocal in their online reviews of their likes and dislikes, we will begin to see what some are describing as the “consumerization” of business-to-business purchasing behavior. So, while not all consumer shopping activities translate to the B2B purchasing model, many do....

A study of the free shopping apps in the Android Play store shows that the most popular apps fall into the broad categories that one would reasonably expect without pushing the limits of imagination: pure play e-commerce, brick-and-mortar retailer apps, coupons & deals, utilities (shopping lists, product scans, loyalty storage) and rewards for shopping behavior [see list at bottom of post]. In general, the most popular shopping apps are not revolutionary in terms of offering consumers a compelling shopping experience that they can’t find elsewhere.

As a result, fewer than 50% of consumers who download the most popular mobile shopping apps are developing regular usage habits. A recent NPD study showing that within 3 months of downloading a retailer’s app, 75% of consumers stop using the app even once a month. The same study shows that more consumers use retailer web sites than apps (71% of consumers vs 57%), perhaps indicating they prefer accessing a retailer’s website on an irregular basis than going through the trouble of downloading a mobile app.

One of the reasons for the lack of regular usage of top mobile shopping apps may be that the majority take a conventional shopping task focused view of a person’s motivations & intentions for using a mobile app, eg. “the user wants to purchase something specific/find coupons/compare products”. Very few take a time-based view of a person’s motivations & intentions for using a mobile app, eg. “the user has many small moments of downtime in the day that they’d like to fill with an engaging app experience”....