The way we shop today is being reshaped by technology, and so are customer expectations. Consumers are voting with their wallets and shopping more online. Everything from client devices and applications have altered how people learn about, evaluate, and buy things. This includes how they share opinions about their products and retailers, and where they buy them.
Online vs In Store Shopping Trends
In the case of our latest Wipro Digital survey conducted during the 2014-2015 holiday season,over 71% of consumers in the UK and 61% in the US reported doing more than half of their 2014 holiday shopping online. Those numbers? That’s not just a trend, it’s a sea-change! It’s a clear metamorphosis in how people are buying today. To quote Avinash Rao, Global Head of Wipro Digital, “Consumers continue their steady march online, finding few reasons to shop in-store rather than online for their holiday shopping.” (See Infographics for the detailed findings from our surveys in the US and UK)
For the sake of this post we’ll revert back and indeed call it a trend though.
This trend moving to online appears to be attributed to three factors: greater convenience,better prices and ease of use. When coupling these 3 factors with the urgency of holiday shopping, you get the perfect storm for internet pure-plays and marketplaces such as Amazon.
So how comfortable are consumers while shopping online? Our survey reveals that even when consumers were in a store, the majority chose to go online to make their purchases.
Bridging the Divide
What implication does this have for our omnichannel retailers? To reverse the consumer trend of shopping online, Wipro Digital recommends they focus on the following six suggestions:
- Engage shoppers with the physical experience of a product.
- Guarantee product availability
- Remind shoppers they may need to pay for shipping when shopping online
- Prove customer data is more secure with a retailer in-store than online
- Increase location-based offers
- Smooth out the journey to and from the store
A great example of a retailer meeting the customer halfway when it comes to melding the digital expectation with a brick and mortar experience is Burberry.
Burberry has been able to maintain its moniker of an innovative retail brand in terms of marketing while still pushing the interactive envelope of personalisation “to new levels.”
The trick for retailers is to deliver on the customer experience online and to exceed the customer’s expectation in store.
In closing, if retailers want consumers to follow them for all the right reasons, Rao suggests that “Retailers need to invest more in understanding, improving and engineering the customer experience in order to entice shoppers to spend more with them.”
Looking for more data? Read both our Post-Holiday Press Release and our Pre-Holiday Press Release.