ComScore: 1 in 7 Europeans owning smartphones use it for online purchases
European mobile retail audience grew by 43% over the past year, with 20% of smartphone users accessing online retail sites and apps using their device. Moreover, 1 in 7 European smartphone users said they completed retail transactions on their mobile phone, according to a comScore study using data from the comScore MobiLens service. The study presents an overview of mobile phone usage across the five leading European markets (EU 5 – France, Germany, Italy, Spain and UK).
During August 2013, 20.4% of EU5 smartphone owners accessed online retail sites, up 2.8% compared to the same period last year. Spain was the fastest growing market (+66.5% to 3.3M smartphone users accessing retail sites on their mobile), Italy came second, with an increase of 61.3% ( 5.6M smartphone users accessing those sites on their device), up 4.8% compared to previous year and reaching a level of 19.3% smartphone users accessing retail sites in a month. In terms of audience size, Germany had the largest number of smartphone users accessing retail sites (9.9M), followed by the UK (9.7M).
When they are in offline retail stores, 36.6M of European smartphone users are taking picture of the product. Also, Europeans tend to seek advice from friends and family when making purchase decisions, as 14.3 percent sent a picture of a product and 14.0 percent called or texted friends/family about a product. Among other activities performed as part of decision making process are also scanning bar codes and compare product prices.
One in seven European smartphone users (14.6%) bought goods or services via their devices during the analyzed month, with the number of Europeans engaging in m-commerce transactions increasing by 37% yoy, from 16.6M to 22.8M.
Top 5 goods and services bought via smartphone were clothing / accessories (5.4%) and consumer electronics/household appliances (3.8%), followed by books (3.8%), tickets (3.4%) and personal care or hygiene products (2.6%).
MobiLens data is derived from an intelligent online survey of a nationally representative sample of mobile phone subscribers age 13 and above. Data on mobile phone usage refers to a respondent’s primary mobile phone and does not include data related to a respondent’s secondary device.
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