Affluent shoppers are embracing the use of their smartphones for influencing purchases.
Unity Marketing has released the results of their latest research, which has shown that over half of all affluent consumers use m-commerce for helping to making their purchasing decisions, including for making dinner reservations, travel bookings, and others.
This is a massive increase over the same figure in 2011, which had been only 25 percent.
This research will be very important for businesses that are targeting shoppers who are patrons of high end shops and brands. It shows that it may be important that these companies look into providing the best possible m-commerce experience sooner, rather than later. This should include a strong optimized website, proactive social media, and other attractive options, say the researchers.
This is because it is precisely their market that appears to be among the most accepting of m-commerce.
These more affluent consumers are the most likely to have luxurious lifestyles that include full internet integration and who are using m-commerce in a rapidly increasing basis as a means of online engagement, said the Affluents Online study.
The study focused on the online usage and habits of wealthy consumers. It centered around a survey that included almost 1,000 consumers with an average income of $248,900. Unity Marketing discovered that 98 percent of the participants in the survey had used the internet for making purchases and to shop for products and services within the three month span of the study.
The average amount spent by the respondents was $3,702 on high-end products. The participants spent an average of 5 hours every week taking part in activities that were related to shopping.
Lead study researcher, Pam Danziger – the Unity Marketing president – pointed out that these shoppers didn’t change their online habits much from 2011 to 2012 in terms of the amount of use of online purchasing, research, payments, reservations, etc. That said, there was one very important shift among these consumers, which was the device that they chose in order to access the internet to perform these activities. M-commerce has taken off within the affluent consumer demographic.
