Google recently commissioned a Nielsen study to understand the role of mobile devices and the customers path to purchase. Nine hundred and fifty people participated in the study, they responded to a servery and there mobile usage was observed for 14 days. I found the results quite interesting here are my thoughts.
Research
Almost 60% of consumers visit a companies website before purchasing anything. On top of that they spent spend more then 15 hours a week on there mobile devices doing this researching. I find this information very enlightening. If 60% of people are visiting your website before purchase and your site doesn’t have good mobile support you are going to loose customers.
Search
Nearly 75% of mobile consumers start the process from a search engine. So before they find your site they had to search for it. This goes to show you why having a really good search engine ranking is so important.
Location Location Location
The third thing mobile consumers are interested in is location. Almost 70% of them would rather have the business with in 5 miles of them and 10% of them are expecting a maximum of 1 mile distance. I think this would be hard to take advantage of, beyond making sure that your location is clearly displayed to mobile users. The only way I think you could would be to insure that your site has a higher search ranking then your local competitors as well as better mobile support. Your location may not be as good as your competitor but if you show up first in search and they can view your website. You should be on the path to a purchase.
I don’t like to wait
More then half of mobile consumers want to make a purchase with in a hour of visiting your site, 83% of them want to purchase with in a day. This just goes to show you how important it is to allow your users to purchase there items online using a mobile device.
Type Matters
The type of product you sell also influences how likely they are to make a purchase. Mobile consumers are 54% likely to make a purchase from a restaurant site, while they are only 40% likely to make a purchase of apparel or beauty related items, electronics surprised me they are only 36% likely to make a purchase.