Survey gives insight to the journey to online purchase

We teach our students that it is critical to analyze and understand customer behavior before developing marketing strategies. With all the data available tracking the online purchase journey, many firms are gathering insights all the time. In addition, surveys can provide further insight about how online consumers shop. This article, “Survey reveals how customer make online product decisions” would be a nice addition to a lecture on consumer behavior (Chapter 5), online retail (Chapter 12), or aspects of promotion like owned media (Chapter 16). The article shares interesting information including:

• Consumers are not very loyal — “only 14% say they likely wouldn’t switch to a competitive product if their first choice wasn’t available.”
• Many consumers are research shoppers — “82% of respondents are likely to look at multiple locations for information on products.”
• Information search often starts with online retailers (e.g., Amazon and eBay) where 44% of respondents indicated they looked first, quite a bit higher than those reporting they started with search engines (19%). Amazon now earns a lot from advertising revenue because of this trend.

The article reports a number of other findings and also links to an interesting article with data on social shopping during the pandemic.