The Showrooming Trend: 50% Adult Engaged In Smartphone Shopping During Store Browsing

Believe it or not, new research studies of Interactive Advertising Bureau shows that 50 percent of adults tend to do smartphone shopping while roaming around the physical store. The market experts call this habit as 'showrooming'. However, this habit is mainly popular among young generations.

As per the VentureBeat report, the IAB explains showrooming as "comparing prices on a mobile device while in a retail store before buying." Most of the times, gen Y end up purchasing products in physical store only after going through a thorough comparison on the smartphone. They generally do the extensive research while browsing the stores.

However, the interesting part is the search or the comparison might not end where it might have started. The most likely scenario in such cases is, shoppers actually purchase the product from another place after leaving that store where they were actually headed for shopping. Later on, they complete their shopping by either using their smartphone or PC.

As the reporter of the Tennessean cited, according to a National Retail Federation (NRF) survey, the number of online shoppers edged out brick-and-mortar traffic during the four-day holiday weekend. More than 103 million consumers shopped online compared to the 102 million in-store shoppers.

Nowadays, not only Thanksgiving, shopping experiences of each and every festivity are now completely different as most of the people want to get the best deal rather than what they get in store promotions. Observing the trend, it is obvious that people prefer to avail some holiday saving opportunities. The days of age-old tradition to visit stores with family and friend are gone.

Market researchers think that Millennials or shoppers of 18-32 years of age tend to behave differently when it comes to shopping. Two-thirds of that group of people is involved in showrooming habit. Due to this showrooming trend the craze for black Friday sale has dropped down.

According to US News, another key factor of Black Friday failure is many retailers are offering bargains long before festivities like Thanksgiving, Halloween etc. even starts, limiting the impact of Black Friday specials.

The extensive study also suggests that 50% adults prefer to buy products at a competing store compared to other general shoppers. However, the older generations purchase things from the same store even after comparing prices on mobile devices. More specifically, the gen Y shoppers like to go for smartphone shopping rather than buying from tablet or PC compared to any other consumer groups.