As the web provides more choices in how to shop, online shoppers are increasingly showing independence in how they like to shop across multiple categories of product and price, Drugstore.com Inc. CEO Dawn Lepore says.
For years, e-commerce experts have attempted to help online marketers and merchandisers by defining groups of online shoppers within categories such as working moms, value shoppers, brand buyers, and impulse buyers, Lepore said during a presentation at the Shop.org Annual Summit this week. But experts are “missing the bigger story,” she said. “Increasingly, online shoppers refuse to be categorized.”
Lepore noted, for example, that shoppers on her company’s online pharmacy Drugstore.com and beauty products site Beauty.com will combine items like a $95 facial kit, disposable diapers and other items in the same online shopping cart.
Unlike traditional store-based retailing, where marketing and merchandising strategies lure shoppers into some locations for high-end products and into other stores for low-price commodities and other price-discounted products, online retailing should reach out to the varied shopping interests of consumers across price and product categories, Lepore said.
Shoppers within any category based on income, personal interests or other criteria may decide at any time to trade up or down according to price or level of product quality within any category, she added. “Don’t assume some groups of shoppers can’t shop with you,” she said.
Drugstore.com is No. 48 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
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