Spanish Retail: 66% of Consumers Compare on Mobile

The number that should shift priorities

According to IAB Spain’s latest digital commerce report (May 2025), 66% of Spanish consumers compare prices on mobile before making a purchase decision. Not after. Not as a supplement. Before. Mobile is the first point of contact with purchase intent.

The number should not surprise anyone who looks at analytics for any Spanish ecommerce site. But the reality is that most retailers still prioritize desktop experience in their development budgets. Mobile gets a responsive theme and not much else.

What it reveals (and what it hides)

The 66% measures comparison, not conversion. Mobile conversion remains significantly lower than desktop: 2.1% versus 3.8% according to aggregated sector data. The gap exists because comparing is fast and buying requires friction (forms, payment methods, visual trust signals).

This creates a pattern that complicates attribution: users discover and compare on mobile, then convert on desktop or in physical stores. Retailers measuring mobile ROI solely by direct conversions underestimate its real value. A Google study for the Spanish market estimates that 40% of desktop conversions had at least one prior mobile touchpoint.

The question for any retail engineering team is straightforward: if 66% of your customers first interact with your brand on a 6-inch screen over 4G, is your stack ready?

Concrete technical implications

Performance. Every additional 100ms of mobile latency reduces conversion by 1.3% according to Deloitte Digital data. In Spain, where average mobile connection speed is 52 Mbps (Speedtest data, Q1 2025), the bottleneck is not bandwidth but rendering time. An LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) above 2.5 seconds on mobile is actively losing customers. The diagnostic tool is simple: Lighthouse in mobile mode with 4x CPU throttling.

Search and filtering. The 66% who compare want to reach the product quickly and see the price. Listing pages with complex filters that work well on desktop become mazes on mobile. The technical solution is not hiding filters behind a button but rethinking taxonomy: fewer filters, smarter ones, with pre-computed values on the backend for instant responses.

Cross-device attribution. Without cross-device attribution, the mobile channel looks like a cost center instead of a demand generator. The minimum viable implementation is a persistent login (connecting sessions across devices) combined with UTM parameters that survive the jump. Tools like GA4 offer native cross-device reporting, but they require active configuration that most implementations skip.

Progressive Web Apps. For retailers who cannot or prefer not to maintain native apps, PWAs offer a reasonable middle ground. Push notifications, offline catalog browsing, home screen installation. A well-built PWA’s performance is comparable to a native app for the price comparison use case. Mercadona, for example, runs a PWA and its mobile engagement metrics sit above the sector average.

What retailers should do now

The path is not rebuilding everything. It is reprioritizing. Three actions with immediate impact:

First, audit real mobile performance with field data (Core Web Vitals from CrUX or from your own analytics), not lab tests. Field data captures the experience of real users on real devices over real networks.

Second, implement cross-device attribution at minimum via login-based identity. Without this, all mobile investment decisions are based on incomplete data.

Third, measure the mobile funnel with engagement metrics (time on product, comparisons made, products added to lists) alongside direct conversion. Mobile is not a sales channel for the 66% who compare. It is a decision channel. Decision metrics are different from transaction metrics. Our consulting team can help you define the right metrics for your mobile channel in the retail sector.

The 66% figure is not a curiosity. It is a signal that the Spanish retail purchase funnel has shifted, and most retailers’ technical infrastructure has not moved with it.