4 app shopper personalities and how to captivate them

The importance of app commerce was verified again by peak trading. As Internet Retailing reported, mobile saved Christmas for many retailers who successfully made mobile a focus of their overall retail strategy.

A successful shopping app caters to different types of shoppers. At Poq we recently analysed a sample of over 790,500 shopping app sessions that took place in 2015 and found that there are four main app shopper personalities you should look out for. You can cater to these individuals with different basic app features that also serve to improve the overall performance of the app.

The socialite

Shoppers who value social affirmation tend to check reviews and like to share via social media. Native social sharing improves the likelihood of purchase by 3.7x, and app users who read reviews penned by fellow shoppers are 3x more likely to convert.

The bargain hunter

The bargain hunter’s favourite app feature is the wishlist. She spends lazy Sundays browsing through her shopping app and adding items to the wishlist, using it to keep an eye on items for when they go on sale. For this reason, wishlists show 1.8x higher conversion rates and 5% lower average order values. If you want to give this demographic a little nudge, create urgency via a custom item category of ‘frequently wished’ items.

The luxe shopper

This type of app user is less concerned about price. What matters is quality above quantity, and one of their favourite features is the shoppable lookbook. Customers browsing lookbooks are 56% less likely to make a purchase than the average shopper, but they will spend around twice as much per order. To encourage these individuals, use multiple lookbooks and showcase your newest and most premium items.

The omnichannel spender

Most of us are already part of the omnichannel shopper demographic. House of Fraser recently found that its most profitable demographic is its multichannel shopper demographic. Retailers should aim to engage their customer across as many different channels as possible, and one way of doing so is through introducing a store stock checker, a barcode scanner and a store finder.

Read more about how different app features can affect app user behaviour in our app commerce report.