Showroomers and Price Elasticity: Intriguing Results Suggest Impact of Free Shipping

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. (more…)