New research released by American Express explores the most prominent spending patterns in Australia.

The research found that 85 per cent of Australians are pattern spenders with their monthly disposable income.

Most never venture beyond 10 different stores or online shops and 49 per cent admit to routinely visiting the same shopping strip or mall.

The American Express Pattern Spending Report investigated shopping motivations and habits of Australians and the findings were that, on average, we can identify with at least two of eight pattern spending types.

These include sale seekers (41 per cent) who sniff out deals and spend the majority of their disposable income on special offers, passionists (30 per cent) who mainly spend on a single interest or hobby, paydayers (28 per cent) who splurge on, or soon after, pay day every month and loyalists (24 per cent) who prefer to stick to the same brands.

Andrew Carlton, VP customer service at American Express, said understanding the complexities of our customers’ spending patterns is what we do every day.

“Our intelligent security systems can easily detect those ‘needles in the haystack’ transactions and this is one of the reasons why we have one of the lowest fraud rates in the country.”

The report also shows that Australians spend an average of 20 per cent of their disposable income online. Of those surveyed, the majority owned a credit card (67 per cent) and of those, two thirds (68 per cent) claimed they use them to shop online.

Security of payment method (22 per cent) and protection from fraud (21 per cent) were rated as the top benefits of a credit card when compared to paying with debit card or cash. When it comes to trusting credit card providers, the biggest drivers are having a fraud refund guarantee (50 per cent) and being immediately contacted when something is wrong (30 per cent).