Retailers need to focus shopping experience around busy consumers
The average American is a busy person, trying to juggle multiple tasks at once in their everyday lives. Retail merchants need to recognize this and assist customers by making the shopping experience revolve around their busy schedule. This is best done by enabling "easy in" and "easy out" shopping, a new report released by The E-Tailing Group suggests.
Every feature or service a retailer launches needs to be focused on expediting the shopping experience. The average customer no longer has the time to figure out how to find whatever it is they are looking for – this process needs to be as seamless and intuitive as possible to secure their purchases. Consumers don't want to invest any more energy than that.
"When deploying new functionality and evolving existing tools, ensure all features are sensitive to the time demands of harried shoppers," Internet Retailer notes, citing the report.
For the most part, merchants are doing an effective job of meeting the demands of today's shopper. For example, the number of retailers offering advanced search features that help consumers more efficiently find goods increased from 21 percent in 2010 to 39 percent in 2011 – up almost twofold. Meanwhile, the merchants offering navigational drop-downs or fly-outs grew from 70 percent to 81 percent in the same time period.
As a model example, the report points to Walmart's website. The retailer's ecommerce platform enables shoppers to narrow their searches by in-store and online availability, brand, price, customer rating, color, special offers and affiliated retailers. Moreover, all these features are integrated seamlessly into the company's website, which makes them easy for time-harried shoppers to use and find.
Organization by brand is one feature that a number of various retailers have implemented into their online product search.
"With more manufacturers selling directly to consumers, merchants have to work harder to distinguish themselves from online competitors," Internet Retailer explains.
"The percentage of sites that enable shoppers to refine results by brand jumped to 79 percent from 64 percent. And the percentage that allow consumers to shop by brand increased to 84 percent from 75 percent," the news source adds.
Retailers should also consider this as they design their anchor stores. Aisles and products should be organized in a way that makes it easy for consumers to find what they want.
