As if the world wasn’t already millennial enough shoppers are increasingly trying to avoid other people, even when they are already in a store.

People are increasingly making online purchases while already in that retailer’s physical store, as they look to avoid queues and interaction with store staff.

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While consumers are driving this trend, retailers are beginning to tap into it — last month Amazon began trialling a grocery format in the US that allowed shoppers to purchase items without checkout counters, and this week in the UK, Tesco rolled out its PayQwiq app, which allows its shoppers to circumnavigate queues.

That this type of transaction has grown almost five-fold since 2014, indicates the importance of investing, not only in mobile optimised websites, but also in facilitating interaction between physical goods and smartphones instore to make it easy for people to browse instore and immediately buy online.

While retailers have expressed concerns about the showrooming implications of smartphone use in their stores, few people actually use them to make purchases from retailers while in a rival’s store, and despite the availability of high-speed mobile internet access, the percentage of online transactions taking place while on-the-go is falling.

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