34% of Consumers Use Their Smartphones to Help Them Shop in Physical Stores

A growing percentage of consumers are using their smartphones while shopping in physical stores, and PYMNTS research has found that this is just one example of the ways in which consumers are making brick-and-mortar stores part of the digital shopping experience — and vice versa.

The share of brick-and-mortar shoppers who use their smartphones to help them shop in stores rose from 28% in 2020 to 34% in 2021, according to The 2022 Global Digital Shopping Index, a PYMNTS and Cybersource collaboration based on a survey of 13,000 consumers and 3,100 merchants across six countries.

Get the report: The 2022 Global Digital Shopping Index

Four of the countries were surveyed in both 2020 and 2021 — Australia, Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States — and each one of them saw that brick-and-mortar shoppers were using their smartphones to help them shop in stores more than they did in the past.

Shoppers most commonly use those smartphones to compare prices, with 15% saying that’s how they use their smartphones at brick-and-mortar stores.

Just about as many — 14% — use their smartphones to search for offers and discounts and to find product information.

Ten percent of in-store shoppers use their smartphones at brick-and-mortar stores to read product reviews, and about 8% use those phones to locate a product in the store, confirm that a product is in stock and build loyalty credit.

PYMNTS research has found that there is a growing recognition across merchants that consumers do not think of their shopping experiences as brick-and-mortar or digital, as omnichannel or multichannel or as something they do on weekends or weekdays. For today’s consumers, it’s all just shopping.