Although the majority of consumer electronics purchases are made at retail locations, 77% were influenced by Internet research, according to a new study from the Consumer Electronics Association and search engine Yahoo Inc.
“Of the total $32.5 billion spent on the (consumer electronic) products tracked in this study, online research influenced a striking 77% or $25.1 billion,” says Tim Hebert, CEA senior director of market research. “Consumers naturally want to make informed CE buying decisions and we found they are turning to the Internet for their research. This includes search engines, manufacturers’ web sites, retail web sites and shopping engines.”
The study—“Understanding How Consumers Use the Internet to Research and Shop for CE products”—tracked the sale of cell phones, computers, digital cameras, digital music players, and televisions and found that online research time increased in tandem with product price. The least amount of time spent researching was on cell phones (nine hours) while the longest time spent was on television (15 hours), the report found. For those who purchased, the average amount of time spent in online research was 12 hours.
The study found that there were many reasons consumers do online research before making in-store purchases of consumer electronics. 73% of consumers said comparing prices of the same product at different stores is easy to do online while 64% said they preferred online research because there are a wide variety of products. 45% of those doing online research used a search engine during the information-gathering process.
Consumers who use search to research consumer electronics represented 47% of the offline and online purchases surveyed, according to the study. They are more educated about what they want to buy, increasingly likely to advocate brands by word-of-mouth and often are considered a resource of information by family and friends. They also consider more brands and are 114% more likely to consider display advertising in their research process.
The study consisted of a June 26 survey of a sample of consumers who intend and those who have already purchased consumer electronics devices.
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