As the web makes retailing more pervasive, consumers are responding with more confidence in cross-channel shopping, according to a recent study conducted by interactive marketing firm Ten/Resource in partnership with Shop.org, a unit of the National Retail Federation. But while web-access to product information and multiple shopping opportunities make consumers savvier shoppers, they can also make shoppers more open to being upsold by in-store salespeople, the study says.
“Confidence is the new end goal; consumers have tasted it and they’re not turning back,” says Laura Evans, managing director of Ten/Resource who oversaw the study, which Ten/Resource will present Sept. 24 at the 2003 Shop.org Annual Summit in New York. “When they’re armed with information they get from the web, they know what they want and when they’re getting good value.”
But that doesn’t mean these consumers can’t be swayed by salespeople, she adds. “I was surprised that, when armed with information from the web that they took into a store, they still wanted to talk to a sales associate to confirm what they learned,” Evans says. And when such encounters involved sales pitches that resulted in shoppers purchasing products more expensive than initially intended, the product knowledge they had gained from web research made them feel comfortable about making the larger purchase, she adds. “I had thought that shoppers wanted online information to prevent from being upsold, but with all their information they felt they were still in control of being upsold,” she says. “If they didn’t have that information and a salesperson led them into unknown territory, then they didn’t feel good about that.”
The Ten/Resource study, which is based on personal videotaped interviews conducted this year with 60 consumers, further underscores the web’s role in making shopping a pervasive experience, Evans says. When it asked consumers why they sometimes abandoned online shopping carts, for example, many said it was because they were shopping online while also tending to other household chores that temporarily called them away from their computers. “They were doing laundry or cooking dinner while shopping,” she says. “They’re weaving shopping in and out of their lives, because the web allows them to do that.”
She adds that consumers have become more accepting of the fact that cross-channel shopping can take more time than shopping in just one channel, because the extra time put into research and comparison shopping online as well as in stores and catalogs often leads to more satisfying purchases.
But consumers also say the web makes them more likely to make impulse purchases, Evans says. “Now consumers see anything, anywhere and act on it to make a purchase. If they see a shirt they like on a friend, they can just go online and find it to research or purchase. The web allows us to act on anything as inspiration strikes.”
The lesson to retailers, she adds, is not to view the web only as a source of direct incremental sales, but as a channel that supports other channels. “We’ve come to look at the web as not just a funnel to the sale but as a facilitator to the brand,” she says.
“Consumers see the web as a tool for managing the shopping they do in every channel,” says Ten/Resource president Kelly Mooney. “Retailers need to understand how this impacts their total business, not just their online sales.”
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