Connecting The Dots On Paying With Connected Devices

Black Friday looms. The holidays loom.

Time to take stock, then, of How We Will Pay – in the retail setting, of course, the focus of our latest survey of how devices and apps will drive sales. The registers, virtual ones and real ones, are set to ring – to peal, even – like carol bells.

Ours is an age where the consumer is connected to an average of 4.4 devices, up from 4.2 last year. The more devices, the less cash we carry, where our findings show a rather slim number of bills in the average wallet, between $10 to $50. The cash is there to tip, say 39 percent of respondents to the How We Will Pay queries, done in conjunction with Visa across 2,800 individuals.

As many as 75 percent of consumers use connected devices to buy, because doing so is convenient, with users having made purchases across seven of 13 categories in the past week.

Retailers would do well to consider that retail is truly an omnichannel experience for shoppers. A little more than eight in 10 – that’s 81 percent – do indeed go the brick-and-mortar route when it comes time to make a purchase. Drill down a bit into mobile commerce, and it turns out that about a third of consumers have used an app to buy items.

A few more tech-driven data points: About 12 percent of consumers have used voice-activated speakers to make purchases, and smartwatches trail a bit, at 4 percent. There may be hope for traction gained across commerce via the spoken word, however – 27 percent of consumers own a voice-activated device, up from 14 percent last year.

Within that 75 percent aforementioned stat, 26 percent of respondents say they’d consider paying with contactless cards as they eye frictionless shopping experiences.

All of this data funnels down into the segmentation of consumers into “personas.” To get a taste of who wields what, how and when to buy, consider a few of those personas. The “mainstream mobile” shopper makes up 17 percent of all consumers, and they own tablets in addition to smartphones. No other devices are part of the pantheon. They are 60 years old on average, with roughly $60,000 annually in earnings – and when they buy, 70 percent buy groceries and 43 percent buy personal care items. There also is the “super connected” consumer, who earns $96,000 yearly and has six or more devices. When these folks buy items with their devices, 80 percent buy groceries, while 67 percent buy personal care items. The data shows that 82 percent of the super-connected shoppers have made an online purchase in the past seven days.