According to Toy Purchase Decisions, the latest report from The NPD Group, the majority of toy buyers know what toy they will buy and at what store. The report finds that 62 percent of toy purchases are planned and more than three-quarters of buyers (77 percent) who made a planned purchase said they knew specifically where they wanted to shop.
If a specific toy was unavailable at a store, 42 percent of toy buyers would look for that toy at a different store and 9 percent would look online to purchase it. Only 22 percent of buyers said they would look for a different product in the same store.
For those purchases that were not planned (38 percent), 70 percent of the unplanned purchases were impulse buys. The other 30 percent of purchases were made because either the buyer was coerced into the purchase by a child (21 percent), or the buyer remembered they needed to buy a toy when they were in the store (9 percent).
According to the report, planned purchases result in higher price points than unplanned purchases; the average price of planned purchases is 1.5 times higher than unplanned. Building sets and youth electronics, categories with the highest price points, are two of the categories most likely to be planned.