On the cusp of the Shop.org meeting, with ten weeks to go until the annual “Black Friday-Cyber Monday” holiday sales kick-off, new research-driven insights into cross-channel shopping and shopping cart abandonment could impact recession-affected eCommerce sales.
Lauren Freedman’s 5th Annual Cross-Channel Shopping Study reveals a drop-off in in-store pick-up, which could potentially depress sales and disrespect a primo audience—multi-channel shoppers. By looking carefully at 40 websites and mystery-shopping 77 retail stores, Lauren and the E-Tailing Group discovered “many merchants are not taking advantage of opportunities to sell and service the cross-channel customer.”
Multi-channel shoppers, according to IDC’s Global Retail Insight survey spend 15-30 percent more than single-channel shoppers and they do it more frequently. Those who shop multiple channels simultaneously spend 15-30 percent more than less hyper multi-channel shoppers. So if you ignore, disenfranchise or piss off these guys you are disconnecting a mighty purchase stream.
Over the last year same day and in-store pick-up of merchandise purchased online has fallen off. Availability of in-store pick-up fell from 54% of surveyed merchants in 2008 to just 39% this year. And the training, signage and dedicated effort to facilitate easy offline pick-ups have degraded as well. Only about ¼ of merchants have web access to shoppers should something be wrong or an instant validation be required.
The ability to whiz through the store and collect your eCommerce goods has also fallen off significantly. In 2008 26% of merchants required no additional check out but this year only 4% offered this express “grab-and-go” option. As you might imagine customers madly buying from catalogs, using iPhones, shopping at websites, clicking on e-mails or dialing 1-800 numbers want their stuff quickly. The key to multi-channel satisfaction is near-immediate gratification.
Maybe this fall off in customer focus and service reflects the reaction of notoriously cheap retailers to the pressures of the recession. Or maybe they’ve just taken their eye off the ball. Either way, ignoring a critical sales driving segment doesn’t bode well for the immediate future.
If under serving key customers doesn’t get your attention, maybe new purchasing patterns will. According to a new study by McAfee, 65 percent of all online shoppers sleep on their purchases. The Digital Window Shopping study, which tracked 163 million online purchases, found that 2 out of 3 online shoppers wait an average of 33 hours and 54 minutes before completing a purchase.
Evidently what we’ve been scoring as cart abandonment seems to be a recession-driven “mulling over period” that, according to McAfee, can be influenced by displaying trust marks or security policy. This is a ready-made case for deploying a robust persistent shopping cart and/or using triggered e-mail messages to nurture and close more sales.
After ten years of robust holiday eCommerce we are still learning new tricks and understanding the nuances of online merchandising. These new data points remind us that retail is dynamic and that by measuring the use of technology we can consistently improve our customer support and sales performance.























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