Bathroom buying habits unearthed

Wednesday, July 17, 2013 - 11:28 by Graham Miller

With more consumers using touchscreen devices like tablets and smartphones to shop online while out and about, there are many new places from which retail interactions can occur.

Wired reports that a new study, conducted by SeeWhy, has found that 10 per cent of American consumers admit to having made an online purchase while in the bathroom, although the activities they are carrying out in this room while shopping are not mentioned.

While this is an interesting development and could be relevant to retailers, the bathroom still ranks at the bottom of the list of the most popular places to carry out safe shopping online, while at home.

At the top is the living room, with 44 per cent of respondents saying that this is their preferred place to indulge in a little e-commerce, ahead of the bedroom with 23 per cent, the kitchen with 19 per cent and the great outdoors, with 14 per cent.

As well as the 1,000 people surveyed by SeeWhy over their m-commerce habits, the company looked at millions of mobile transactions and discovered that consumers are three times more likely to go through with an online purchase if they are using a tablet when compared with a smartphone.

This is probably to do with the fact that a tablet is seen as a replacement for laptops, whereas the smaller, more portable nature of a mobile handset means that it is less conducive to long retail sessions.

Millions of people in the UK and abroad now own both a tablet and a smartphone and we are turning to a combination of these gadgets to experience e-commerce sites away from a desktop environment.

If retailers can cater to bathroom browsers as well as those in the other rooms of the house, they can achieve anything.