Smartphones: The ultimate shopping companion

New research from Nielsen’s US Digital Consumer Report released today reveals that 29% of smartphone owners use their phone for shopping-related activities. Top activities among mobile shoppers include in-store price comparisons (38% of mobile shoppers), browsing products through their mobile web or apps (38%) and reading online product reviews (32%).

Apps, which account for the majority of mobile phone time in the US, may be the key to shifting consumers from browsing products on their phone to making purchases on the spot. Although only 9% of mobile shoppers have used their phone to pay at the register, the desire to do so is apparent – 71% of app downloaders would be interested in an app that allows them to use their phone as a credit card. iPhone users are more interested in this option than Android users, with over a third (39%) saying they would be extremely or very interested in an app with this ability.

App downloads overall are growing as consumers downloaded twice as many Shopping/Retail apps than they did last year.

The key points from the report include:

• Digital has changed significantly over the last decade. Today, 274 million Americans have internet access through their computer, more than double the number with internet access in 2000. Time spent on social networks/blogs has increased from 6.6 billion minutes in 2005 to 81 billion minutes in Oct. 2011. Smartphone ownership has increased steadily as well – 44% of mobile users own a smartphone in Oct 2011 compared to 3.2% in 2006.

• US consumers have more choices than ever for where to access their digital content: 35.9 million TV homes (31% of US TV homes) have four or more TV sets, 165.9 million people watched video online during October 2011 and 31.4 million people access the internet through their mobile phone.

• US consumers increased their monthly online video time by 7% from 3Q 2010, but TV and mobile video viewing remained flat from a year ago.

• Among digital categories of time, YouTube was the top destination for online video content, accounting for nearly half (45%) of Americans’ total streaming time. Social networks/blogs remained the top online activity (21% of total internet time), and the majority of mobile phone time was consumed by app usage (64%).

• More and more, US consumers are multi-tasking between their various screens. 57% of smartphone and tablet owners checked email while watching TV and 44% visited a social networking site.

• When comparing the devices on which men and women engage with social networking, females are more likely than men to read social media content from their eReaders and men are more likely than women to access their social content from an internet-enabled TV or gaming console.

• By the end of 2011, NM Incite tracked over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million in 2006. Three of the top ten social networks in the US during October were true blogs (Blogger, WordPress.com, Tumblr), with a combined 80 million unique visitors. Among the top social networks, Tumblr has shown the strongest growth in visitors, more than doubling its audience from last year.

• Mobile is transforming into a powerful commerce tool as 29% of US smartphone owners use their phone for shopping-related activities.