Much of the gear to be purchased for September will be bought over smartphones.
The results of a survey conducted for Placecast have shown that American parents are more likely to make mobile commerce purchases during this back to school season than adults who do not have children under the age of 18 living at home.
The Alert Shopper III research was conducted by Harris Interactive and studied digital shopping.
It looked into both online and mobile commerce shopping habits of parents and nonparents, and noted the purchasing behaviors that were made over smartphones ranging from email and text alerts to actually taking action and buying something.
Twenty seven percent of parents took part in mobile commerce purchasing within the last 12 months.
This was significantly higher than the 17 percent of nonparents who made purchases within the last year using their smartphones. The research also determined that parents have a likelihood of making a purchase as a result of a retailer’s text message that was three times greater than that of nonparents. Nine percent of parents would respond to one of these texts by making a purchase, while only 3 percent of nonparents were converted.
Moreover, parents were found to be more than twice as likely to use location based social networking services to check in to a place with their smartphones than nonparents. Eleven percent of parents do so, compared to 5 percent of nonparents.
The survey also looked beyond mobile commerce and into smartphone ownership. What it determined was that more than half (52 percent) of parents owned a smartphone, compared to only just over a third (35 percent) of nonparents. One of the theories put forward by the report was that parents have become more reliant on their cell phones to make their lives simpler and more convenient.
This includes everything from using GPS to find a store’s location to receiving emails and text alerts from retailers or buying a product online using a mobile commerce website. Discounts and coupons received through smartphones were also highly popular among parents, said the research report, as were daily deal companies and group discount offer sites.
