Online Still Wooing Customers from Brick and Mortars
Omnichannel retailers will have their work cut out for them in 2015, as they attempt to entice shoppers with both their web and brick and mortar presence in order to compete effectively against online-only stores.
A recent study by Wipro found that when consumers browse online and in a store, many opt to ultimately make the purchase online: 34% of U.K. consumers and 33% of U.S. consumers reported purchasing in that manner.
‘There is no doubt consumers are interacting with brands across both the online and in-store channels,” said Avinash Rao, Global Head, Wipro Digital. “But omnichannel retailers are missing a big opportunity to capture the 1/3 of consumers who say they are researching in store but leave to buy online.”
Indeed, online shopping this past holiday season continued to grow in popularity and accessibility, with 71% of surveyed consumers in U.K., and 61% in U.S., reported they did more than half their 2014 holiday shopping online. That is a major uptick from 2013, when just 45% in U.K. and 36% in U.S. reported doing the majority of their shopping online.
The online shopping trend is being driven by three factors: greater convenience, better prices and ease of use. Online pure play retailers are the big winners of this shift: 44% of U.K. and 47% of U.S. shoppers report doing more than half their online shopping on such sites. What should concern brick and mortar retailers is the finding that a quarter of the shoppers are not even considering bricks and mortar retailers’ websites.
Sounds like retailers need to leverage the one thing they have that those pure play online stores do not: location, location, location.
“Omnichannel retailers need to invest more in understanding and improving the customer experience journey to entice shoppers to spend more with them in-store,” said Rao. “Customer journey engineering as an approach to understanding, designing and delivering relevant and differentiated customer experiences across all channels and touch points will help retailers reverse the trend and avoid a future when consumers are no longer visiting their stores.”
Competitive pressures can be a motivating force to drive retailers to provide a differentiated shopping experience. Ecommerce retailers understand how customers want to shop online and deliver that experience well; brick and mortars need to learn what drives customers to buy from them, and capitalize on those strengths. Further, if retailers can determine the source of dissatisfaction and not just fix it, but turn it around into an enjoyable experience, that can turn consumer indifference into delight.
