Digital Shoppers Expect Cross-Channel Consistency

Monday, Jan. 27, 2014   It's vital to make sure your media marketing department help the local-direct client gain access to your ability to help them with SEO and SEM as it will make their sites more viable. Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.   According to the findings of a new IBM study of more than 30,000 global consumers, the percentage of consumers willing to share their current location via GPS with retailers nearly doubled year-over-year to 36%. 38% of consumers would provide their mobile number for the purpose of receiving text messages and 32% would share their social handles with retailers.   Jill Puleri, IBM Retail Global Industry Leader, says "… today's consumer… conditioned by multiple industries… from healthcare to travel… expects personalized interactions across different channels… " The study found that the five most important omnichannel capabilities to consumers are, in order: Price consistency across shopping channels Ability to ship items that are out of stock in the store directly to their home Option to track the status of an order Consistent product assortment across channels Ability to return online purchases in the store The report says that consumers fall into four distinct groups differentiated by their interest in and use of social, location and mobile technologies while shopping; 19% of consumers surveyed lag behind the majority of the population when it came to using technology to shop 40% of shoppers use social, location and mobile technologies for information gathering, but are not likely to use them to purchase products 29% use social, location and mobile much more extensively, for everything from researching products to ordering goods 12% of consumers surveyed are classified as "Trailblazers," those who use these technologies across channels and base their choice of retailer on whether they make that possible Consumers are increasingly shopping online, says the report. In 2013, 84% of shoppers surveyed chose the store to make their last non-grocery purchase. This year, that figure dropped to 72%. Surprisingly, showrooming is not behind this online growth. While more respondents showroomed this year (8% versus 6% last year), only about 30% of all online purchases actually resulted from showrooming, a drop from nearly 50% last year. 70% of online purchases were made by shoppers that went directly to the web.