Showrooming Price Elasticity, July 2013 [CHART]

Chart - Showrooming Price Elasticity

A new “Shopper Showrooming Study” [PDF] study from parago contains a host of “core” statistics related to showrooming (58% of smartphones owners do it! It’s growing quickly!), but it’s perhaps best to leave aside exact percentages as surveys often turn up different results. (Here’s a roundup of some data on showrooming behavior – and here’s one study that argues that it’s over-hyped). The more intriguing snippets of the parago study come in the discussion of price elasticity and in some of the behaviors of low- and high-income respondents that appear on the surface to be counter-intuitive.

The data concerning price elasticity looks primarily at what it would take for a smartphone owner to abandon (or not abandon) an in-store purchase in favor of a purchase from Amazon, which happens to be the leading method by which respondents compare prices, per the study. The results suggest that 63% would buy from Amazon if a $50 item in-store were $45 on Amazon, while 76% would buy from Amazon if a $100 item in-store were $90 on Amazon. (These respondents appear quicker to switch than some others.) Read the rest at MarketingCharts.