Survey: Digital shopping affects brick-and-mortar customer habits

1/29/2019
Online and mobile shopping are having an impact on how consumers shop in physical stores, according to a new survey.

Results from “Consumer Attitudes to Mobile Banking, Contactless Payments & mCommerce Survey 2018: UK/US,” a survey of more than 1,000 smartphone users in the U.S. and U.K., indicate online shopping is having a detrimental effect on physical retailers. Forty percent of survey respondents in both the U.S. and the U.K. report that they shop less in stores due to using online and mobile commerce.

In addition, the trend of “showrooming,” or looking at physical goods in stores and then checking prices online, was reported by 24% of U.K. respondents and 13% of U.S. respondents.

However, at least for U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers, the growth of m-commerce is not an entirely negative phenomenon. Few U.K. consumers report increasing overall retail spending due to their use of mobile shopping. Meanwhile, 30% of U.S. respondents say they shop more overall, including in physical stores, as a result of participating in m-commerce.

Despite m-commerce prompting more overall shopping among U.S. consumers, it is not driving growth of OEM pay, or mobile payment services offered by smartphone providers such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. Fourteen percent of U.S. respondents currently use OEM pay options.

“Time is running out for OEM pay providers to establish a dominant position in the U.S.,” said research author James Moar. “Many of mobile payment’s benefits, like increased transaction speed, are not exclusive to smartphones, and our survey shows that the majority of users who have not adopted OEM pay are more interested in services like contactless cards than mobile-based payments.”

Additionally, the survey shows that continued reliance on browser-based online purchasing is perpetuating non-biometric authentication methods, like passwords or PINs, which Juniper Research says poses an ongoing security problem.
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