As more shoppers browse and buy online, the need for retailers to invest in better ecommerce software and improve the shopping experience will likely increase as well. A recent study by Compare Metrics and the e-tailing group found that while many shoppers enjoy online shopping for a variety of reasons, the offerings of ecommerce software tend to leave them feeling shortchanged in the product discovery process.

Finding the right product should be an easy and intuitive process, but 73 percent of shoppers interviewed for the study said they had issues with search options, from the various filters to a site's misinterpretation of a key phrase that limited results. For this reason, 70 percent of consumers looked for the items they wanted with browsing tools rather than search options, reserving the latter for highly specific inquiries that would not lead them to the wrong products.

"Consumers prefer to browse versus search," Garrett Eastham, CEO of Compare Metrics, told MediaPost News. "The more relevant the inventory, the more likely consumers are to engage and make a purchase."

Retailers that want to take advantage of this study's findings may want to look into new ways to improve the shopping experience in their online stores, whether by creating better search tools or simplifying their sites to make browsing easier and more exciting for buyers.

This entry was posted by Retail Pro on Tuesday, April 8th, 2014 at 6:40 pm .