97% of Gen Alpha kids make purchasing decisions independently

LONDON, ENGLAND — Ninety-seven percent of children make purchasing decisions independently at least some of the time — a behavioral shift that fundamentally redefines who the customer is, and forces brands to rethink every assumption embedded in the single-user purchase journey, new  PwC research finds. 

Social media now shapes what Gen Alpha wants

Ali Furman, United States Consumer Markets Industry Leader at PwC, calls Generation Alpha the household’s “chief influence officers” — a generation born with the buy button at their fingertips and the digital fluency to use it. The research puts numbers to the shift: three in five Gen Alpha children say social media shapes what they want, outranking television, in-store browsing, and even peer influence.

One in four independently orders through shopping apps, food delivery platforms, or websites; more than half add items to shared online carts for a parent to review and approve.

“The definition of the customer is changing,” Furman said. “It’s less about a single individual moving through a defined journey and more about a shared process shaped by multiple participants under one roof.”

The shared cart rewrites the CX playbook

The child-selects, parent-approves pattern is no longer a fringe household behavior — it is the default purchasing dynamic for a generation that has never known a world without one-click shopping, shared accounts, and always-on social discovery.

CX systems built around a single-user, linear journey are now structurally mismatched to how Gen Alpha households actually discover, decide, and buy.

Furman’s recommendations are direct: appear where digital discovery happens, design systems that support shared decision pathways, and earn trust from both the child who discovers and the adult who controls the budget — because in a Gen Alpha household, those are now two distinct and equally influential actors in the same transaction.

For CX and operations teams, the practical question is who builds and maintains the infrastructure behind these collaborative features — shared carts, cross-account messaging, social-integrated discovery flows, and the real-time responsiveness Gen Alpha demands.

As enterprises race to redesign around multi-user journeys, business process outsourcing (BPOs) embedded tightly within clients’ digital product teams are better positioned to support the build, test, and iterate cycle these experiences require.

The brands that close that gap first will own the Gen Alpha household relationship before competitors recognize the structural shift has already occurred.