Mobile shopper typology: a shopping motive-based clustering approach to discovering differences in shopping patterns along the mobile path-to-purchase

Abstract

Since m-shopping has gained widespread popularity in society, it has become mainstream in many parts of the world. Consumers not only use mobile devices during their entire path-to-purchase in and around the brick-and-mortar business, but they also increasingly make direct internet purchases with their mobile devices. Consequently, one can expect the shopping behaviour of consumers to be diverse. Therefore, based on a typology approach, this study provides a detailed insight into the different buying routines of m-shoppers. Using a sample of 799 consumers, in a first step this study extracts and verifies three m-shopper clusters: while motivated shoppers and casual shoppers are located at the extremes of the cluster profiles, smart shoppers are somewhere in the middle. Then, in a second step, the empirical findings reveal further significant differences between all three m-shopper types in terms of their individual path-to-purchase, thereby confirming diverse consumption patterns where the m-channel is used.