My Very Unscientific Poll Survey!

[RedBar]

#1 ... Do not give me any grief over this, just go and try it yourself.

As usual I went to the pub tonight however I wanted to get an opinion from sub 30 year olds about their smartphone Internet buying habits. The questions were quite simple:

Do you buy on your phone - Yes
Where do you buy - On their app
Do you buy there often - Yes
Where do you buy if you do not buy on your preferred choice app - Usually Amazon
If not Amazon, where - Ebay
Do you use any search for your purchase - Mostly no
Why do you not use search - Why should I ... WOW!
What do you trust more, Internet or personal recommendation - Personal 100%

Right, this was done with 30+ people as a totally random selection female/male/trans none of whom I had ever met before and were most intrigued as to what the heck a Webmaster did !

As I said, very, very unscientific however I feel that it may gives us some very basic answers.

MY OPINION: Go do this yourself in a pub, town centre, anywhere, people love to participate in these sort of things, I didn't have one objection, in fact they were all fascinated in my webmastering history since, understandably, this has never been taught simply because we were all "a little bit busy working 48 hours days" :-)))

Remember this ... Without us NONE of this would have happened .!.!.!

[Marshall]

While this is truly great information, I believe there is a flaw. Most people will purchase from the same place via the same method the majority of the time for things they know regardless of their age, but your survey does not take into account items infrequently bought, say for example a new faucet for a kitchen sink.

[JesterMagic]

Surprised about ebay. Definitely not as popular here in Canada.

It always blows my mind that people do shopping on their phones. I can understand things you have bought before but if any research is involved regarding price or what is the best product, I need something with a bigger screen.

[engine]

If you'd asked me you'd have gotten different answers, but I take your point.

It's always been true that people buy through recommendations. I was using that many years ago.

Nowadays, with social media influencers, many people see what the influencer says, and then make purchases on that recommendation. This has been going on for some time, and has been a great opportunity for influencers to earn. A search engine plays no part in the process.

[RedBar]

Surprised about ebay.

Ebay is huge in the UK with many people, believe it or not, classsifying themselves as eBayers or Amazonians. I'm a regular eBayer, say 3-4 times a month, Amazon at most a couple of times in a year.

As I said, it was very unscientific and was done on the spur of the moment since I had been discussing only 1-2 hours before with a couple of other well-established webmasters how it is possible these days to rank top 3 yet not see any, or very little, traffic for those specific products but meanwhile knowing that my UK customers are selling them from my supplies!

It would be great if we could get an independent social site (is there such a place?) to conduct a survey like this since it could possibly give us some of the answers to questions many are asking.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I've gotten feedback about shopping habbits and the number of times an online shopper told me they used Amazon instead of a local shop simply because they didn't know they could get a better price locally is staggering. Many times they don't realize that it's the same items from the same Amazon seller available locally for a discount over Amazon prices.

Shipping is where they get flustered. "Amazon shipping is fast and cheap" they say.

It's True. In Canada for example it can cost $40 to ship a small engine part from across town but there is FREE shipping if the same item comes from China ? The shipping costs are often a deciding factor but in reverse to common sense, local shipping should be cheaper. It's most often not.