If you’re extremely online, you may have heard about the brewing generational argument over “laptop purchases” versus “phone purchases.” The basic concept is simple: Online shopping using your phone is fine for smaller, everyday purchases, but for bigger things—like airline tickets, or appliances—you should use a laptop. It’s usually framed as a gap between Generation Z and Millennials, with the latter insisting that certain transactions are “laptop purchases” and the former mocking them by posting about buying a house on their phone while lying on the couch.
Depending on your age, you probably have a gut reaction to this—the idea of buying a plane ticket on my phone makes me break out into a sweat, for example. But there are actually some very solid reasons why you should make larger purchases using your computer, and not your phone.
Bigger screen benefits
Even if your smartphone is one of those eight-inch folding monsters, there’s a fundamental reason buying stuff on your laptop or desktop is a better option: information. As in, you can see a lot more of it on a larger screen with multiple browser tabs. Even a modest laptop screen of 13 or 15 inches can display a lot more information at a glance than a phone screen. The increased screen real estate also makes it easier to flip between browser tabs to compare prices or look up ancillary information that can inform or augment your purchase, like digital coupons.
There’s an element of personal preference here, of course; people who use their phones for every single aspect of their lives may not have any trouble managing 27 browser tabs on that tiny screen—but they’re definitely not getting all of the information on a single screen that a laptop or desktop user is getting. And when making a big purchase, more information is always a good idea.
Friction & drip
One reason retailers would actually love it if we all started buying everything using our phones is what you could term “friction”—all the extra steps and open windows that slow down the purchasing process just a little bit. If you’ve ever had your finger twitch at the wrong moment and you wound up buying the wrong seats for a concert, for example, you know how important that friction can be.
Another reason a laptop is a better choice for a large purchase is drip pricing. Drip pricing is when the initial, advertised price of something (a plane ticket, for example) is extremely low—but every single add-on, amenity, or adjustment adds a little more cost, often behind the scenes. People tend to make worse spending decisions when dealing with drip pricing strategies, because by the time they realize how much higher the final price is, they don’t think going back and restarting the process is worth whatever money they’d save by making different choices. And this effect can be more powerful on a phone because of the perceived difficulty level of starting over, and because it can be more difficult to see the extra costs being added to the total every time you tap on something.
Focus
When you use your phone to make purchases, you’re also often fighting against the ingrained way we tend to use these devices. Laptops and computers are often used at our jobs or in school applications, while we tend to use our phones more casually, often as a distraction. That subtle difference can impact how well we focus when making online purchases, making it easier to fall into impulse buying on our phones. This can be exacerbated by the ease of the transaction; getting up to open up a laptop or boot up a desktop computer forces us to pause before we click “buy,” and so-called “dark patterns”—design tricks that manipulate you into spending more or making more impulsive purchase choices—can be more effective on mobile devices.
The most important aspect of online shopping is that you’re comfortable with the process, so if you prefer making purchases—even for big-ticket items—on your mobile device, you do you. But it’s worth considering the very real advantages of the larger screen and inc
