Holiday shopping online? You’re better off putting down the phone, researchers say
Shopping online for the holidays this year? You’ll do better if you put down that phone and do your digital browsing on a real computer, new research shows.
As Black Friday looms and online retailers put their final touches on their Cyber Monday deals, research from Ben-Gurion University in Israel shows customers will get a bigger selection and make better choices from a PC instead of a phone or a tablet.
The problem with shopping on a mobile device is the “responsive web design” that retailers, and most other websites, use to make their sites easier for people browsing on their phones, according to Lior Fink, head of the Mobile Behavior Lab at the university.
“It is actually the fact that sites adjusted for mobile viewing reduce the information offered on the results page and require more digging around in the site for information. Sites adjusted for PC viewing give more information right up front,” Fink said in a press release about the new study.
The same applies for shopping online any time of year and no matter what you want to buy: the latest holiday toy, a hotel room or a new computer, the researchers said.
The new research, funded by the Israel Science Foundation, will be presented at the International Conference on Information Systems in December.
People in the United States spent more than $2 billion shopping online with their phones on Black Friday last year, the researchers said. For all of 2018, “phones accounted for 47% of traffic to online stores and 36% of sales according to Adobe Analytics,” researchers said.
“While mobile friendly presentation improves visibility, it reduces the amount of information and causes consumers to make decisions that are less consistent with their preferences,” Fink said.
The researchers said they did two experiments. They had people looking at either a PC or a mobile device select a fictitious hotel room out of 11 options.
“They viewed eight informational features about each room option on the PC display and only three on a mobile display. While all the information was available in both displays, it was more readily available on the PC display,” according to the press release.
This story was originally published November 22, 2019 at 9:45 AM.
