Consumers are using the internet to an increasing degree before and during purchases.
Most of today’s shoppers have been trending away from shopping in-person and toward mobile shopping and other online spending tools either to prepare to buy something or to actually make the purchase.
This, according to the 2023 Consumer Product Content Benchmark Report by 1WorldSync.
The research involved the collection of data from 1,500 shoppers throughout the United States and Canada. It showed the growing popularity of online shopping and mobile shopping both before and during a purchasing experience.
The report indicated that consumers are highly focused on the use of digital tools before committing to a purchase. This includes conducting both in-store and online research into a product or service being considered. The survey showed that 87 percent of consumers are using their smartphones to look into a product even while standing in a store considering a purchase at least some of the time. The majority (72 percent) of those searches were conducted to compare prices. Another 69 percent said that they looked into customer reviews while in-store. Furthermore, 52 percent used their phones to look into product descriptions.
Online and mobile shopping trends are also continuing to grow in terms of making purchases.
Beyond researching a product, its price and reviews, among other things, consumers are also increasingly turning online to purchase a desired item or service. Of the survey respondents, 66 percent had purchased an item online within the prior year that they had previously only ever purchased in-store. Of those, 50 percent were clothing and accessories, 42 percent had purchased health and personal care products, and 35 percent bought beauty and cosmetic that they’d only bought in-store beforehand.
Compared to the height of the pandemic in 2021 when the percentage of online shoppers in new categories reached 82 percent, the trend has dropped, though only slightly from where it was in 2022 at 68 percent. This suggests that sustained consumer comfort with purchasing online while being physically present in retail stores is being sustained.
“In today’s retail landscape, online and in-store shopping experiences are intrinsically intertwined, each bolstering the other to meet the evolving demands of modern consumers,” said 1WorldSync CEO Steve Sivitter in a news release about the mobile shopping report. “The boundaries between digital and physical retail channels are dissolving, giving rise to a ‘phygital’ shopping era where consumers seamlessly merge online and in-store shopping to make informed in-store purchases and vice versa. This interconnected ecosystem reflects the future of retail, demonstrating the complementary and indispensable relationship between online and brick-and-mortar platforms in enhancing customer experience and choice.”
