Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

There's more evidence to support the growing importance of mobile devices along the path to purchase.

According to Nielsen's fourth-quarter 2015 Mobile Wallet Report, 37 percent of respondents said their purchases start with mobile shopping more than one-quarter to half of the time.

The report compares mobile use from the fourth quarter of 2015 to the same period the year before. It found that shoppers are using mobile devices, particularly smartphones, to assist with in-store sales more frequently than for online shopping.

Roughly 72 percent are researching an item or checking prices on a smartphone before buying. Store locators are popular with 60 percent of smartphone users, and 55 percent are using mobile coupons.

Reviews are popular with slightly more than half of all mobile device users and 44 percent of smartphone users use digital lists while shopping....

Mobile changes everything. We all know that’s true, right? Did you also know that mobile really doesn’t change anything at all? I’m serious. Hang in there for a moment, and I’ll explain what this is all about.

Specifically, it all comes down to how your customers use mobile. It’s pretty clear that mobile changes customer behavior pretty radically. Yet, at the same time, mobile doesn’t change customer behavior at all.

What’s also new is the speed with which they’ve adopted these behaviors. Responsive design and in-app advertising can help ensure you appear whenever customers go looking for a solution, wherever they happen to be....

Eyeballs have been shifting aggressively to mobile in recent years but the bucks - at least for ecommerce - remained anchored to the desktop. That is now changing according to a new study by Criteo.

The advertising optimization platform analyzed individual transaction data covering over $130 billion of annual sales across more than 3,000 online retailers and travel advertisers recently and discovered that across its extensive network mobile now accounts for almost 30 per cent of ecommerce transactions.

And the company predicts that it will reach 50 per cent in the US in the near term.Criteo also outlines what it sees as five new mobile shopping trends....

About 70 percent consumers are expected to use their smartphones for shopping in the coming year, a new study has revealed.

The study conducted by research firm IDC found that 69 percent of respondents agree that the smartphone is a critical tool for shopping and is going to transform the shopping experience. It was also revealed that about seven in 10 respondents checked prices using their smartphones, and five in 10 said that they checked reviews from their smartphones.

The research found that one in five survey respondents bought from a competitor while they were shopping in a retail store this holiday season, while one in three purchased much more online versus in a retail store this year compared to last year. The research analysed the app and mobile Web activity of over 10,000 smartphone users during the holiday shopping season and Amazon came on top with more consumer accessing its app while brick-and-mortar retailers lagged behind....