Convenience and price drive online shopping, experts say
Convenience and price are the twin drivers of online shopping, Chuck Davis, chairman of comparison shopping site Shopzillla.com, and Patti Freeman Evans, retail analyst with Jupiter Research, will tell attendees at the Shop.org 2005 Annual Summit next week during their session “What the Research and the Researchers Say Customers Really Want.”
Davis and Freeman Evans will be presenting the results of original research conducted for the Shop.org meeting.
“Consumers really want convenience of shopping,” Davis says. “People say they want it 24/7, they want it easy and they don’t want to have to deal with people. Convenience is a key factor in creating value. If they can find something conveniently and easily, the site has already created value for the consumer.”
Price, however, remains important and, in fact, is growing in importance, Freeman Evans will tell attendees at the breakout session next Tuesday, Sept. 13 at 2 p.m. In fact, the importance of price grew 32% in the past year as an element in choosing where to buy, Freeman Evans says. “Price has always been important, but it’s so much more so now that we’re seeing issues that retailers need to address.”
Among those issues are how to differentiate one retailer’s offering from another when all carry the same product with the same description and images. “There are so many choices, it’s so hard to make a decision and so many retail sites are indistinguishable form one another that the decision comes down to the lowest common denominator—price,” Freeman Evans says.
She says she will urge attendees to find ways to differentiate their sites through strong branding or other non-price related offerings.
Davis says he will tell retailers to pay particular attention to their delivery practices. “Time is money and it’s not just the money we save but the instant gratification we get by receiving our purchase quickly,” he says.
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