Of all the mobile shopping apps in the market, the company with the most data on consumer-user behavior is undoubtedly Amazon. But price monitoring mobile application ShopAdvisor also probably has a pretty good window into consumer behavior as well.

The company behind ShopAdvisor, Evoqu, released some data (based on its 100K users over the Thanksgiving-Black Friday weekend) that captures the varied ways in which mobile apps are being used by consumers. It revealed three mobile shopping behaviors (based on purchase location):

•  in-store price checkers (11%)
• "couch commerce" buyers (54%)
• deferred purchasers (35%) 

Evoqu said that consumers generally placed products above $156 on "WatchLists" for later research, discussion or price drops. Price-driven alerts later caused purchases of many of the "watched" items. This was also interesting about e-commerce vs. local/offline shopping: mst of ShopAdvisors' users stayed away from local stores during that first weekend: 

Mobile users shop locally, but not so much on Black Friday. The proportion of consumers who used ShopAdvisor to find local products dropped by 50% during the busy holiday shopping weekend. In the week prior to Thanksgiving, 20% of mobile users chose a local retailer to make a purchase, but from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, only 10% of users braved the mall or other local shops.

Here are the top 10 categories by percentage of mobile shopping (not necessarily buying) activity:

1. Toys 13.8%
2. Tablets & media players 7.0%
3. TVs 5.8%
4. Xbox 360 games 5.1%
5. Digital Cameras 5.0%
6. Women's Shoes 4.5%
7. Men's Shoes 4.4%
8. Small Kitchen Appliances 2.3%
9. Watches & Accessories 2.2%
10. Outerwear 1.9%

Assuming that the data above (in-store, couch, deferred) reflect the actual point of purchase, what's interesting is that the minority of mobile purchases happened during in-store shopping, which may have been based in part on crowd avoidance that weekend. Most (at least 54%) happened at home, where a PC was readily available. It may also be that a sizable chuck of the deferred purchases happened at home. It's not clear. 

Regardless, this is another study that shows how assumptions about mobile behavior and actual mobile behavior are often quite different.