The line between browsing and buying online and offline is blurring as technology is enabling nearly everything to become a digital touchpoint. Ecommerce is becoming crucial to growth because creating a relevant, integrated and engaging shopping experience means winning offline as well.
At its recent Consumer 360 conference, Nielsen facilitated a discussion around the key challenges that both retailers and manufacturers are currently facing, and the importance for companies to have a complete understanding of their consumers.
Whilst ecommerce is experiencing high growth, research shows that consumer behaviour online is unusual compared to offline shopping behaviour, combined with the fact that the path from discovery to purchase is becoming ever more complex.
According to Nielsen’s Digital Shopping Global Survey for Q2 2013, here are the key challenges both retailers and manufacturers are currently facing, and the solutions on how best to deal with them:
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Challenge #1: Price is the key driver for online purchases
Solution: Retailers need to create an integrated multi-channel execution that drives value to consumers and creates connections across multiple channels. In-store visits can become opportunities to drive re-purchase or incremental sales online, for example.
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Challenge #2: 90% of retail site visitors are browsers, not buyers
Solution: Understand how your customers are using each channel, and create unique benefits for each – potentially offering a high-end product online or delivering a personalised in-store shopping experience.
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Challenge #3: 60% of online trips include only one category
Solution: To better understand your shopper’s behaviour, combine online data with retailer and third-party data to get a complete view of the consumer. This will help your brand learn how to better communicate with consumers, and anticipate when they want to move directly to purchase.
As discussed in a recent guest blog by Shopwyre, every digital touchpoint is a potential sales opportunity in today’s hyper-connected world. With its new digital path to purchase, content and the ability to purchase must be seamlessly integrated so that any time a shopper engages with a brand, commerce is right there at their fingertips. In the words of Unilever executive Doug Staton, “Ecommerce is not just a channel, it’s a window that enables you to shop anywhere.”
About Profitero
Pricing intelligence company Profitero provides retailers with actionable price intelligence data, monitoring over 50 million products across 4,000 eCommerce retailers every day, observing pricing, promotions and stock availability. We work with the world’s leading retailers, enabling them to acquire new customers and grow profit margins by monitoring and responding to changes in competitor pricing and promotional activity as they happen. For more information on Profitero price intelligence and competitor monitoring, visit www.profitero.com or email sales@profitero.com
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