Though More Consumers Shop in Stores, Most Research Online First: Survey

Consumers may shop in stores more than they do online, but for most—93%—the research into these purchases is taking place online, finds a survey released Tuesday by Revel Systems, an iPad-based point-of-sale system provider.

More consumers, 86%, shopping in person at least twice in the month proceeding the July survey compared with 66% of the more than 2,500 respondents who shopped online the same number of times in the same period. But e-commerce sales for the second quarter—the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Commerce—made up 8.1% of all retail sales, a 15.8% increase from the same quarter in 2015 when it comprised 7.1% of total sales.

The disparity between in-store and online shopping increases as the number of purchases grow. Of those who shopped at least four times a month, 63% did it in person compared with 28% who shopped online.

“Although the convenience of online shopping has risen to prominence, it is no replacement for brick-and-mortar,” the Revel System report said.

One aspect where online resources are dominating is in purchase research. Indeed, 93% of consumers say they research an item online prior to buying it in a store.

This is telling, says Jordan McKee, senior analyst for mobile payments at Boston-based 451 Research. “The shopping journey is no longer one-dimensional,” McKee says in an email to Digital Transactions News. “More often than not, it begins in one channel and ends in another, underscoring the importance of developing omni-channel capabilities to effectively serve consumers across touchpoints.” Sixty-four percent of those surveyed say it’s important that merchants have an online site.

For retailers, this means investing in software that helps them see their customers’ shopping patterns regardless of how they interact with the merchant, McKee says. “Having a channel-specific perspective of a shopper is fairly useless,” he says. “Consumers don’t think in terms of channels and neither should merchants.”

The melding of online and in-store shopping, from research to purchase, is only going to continue to grow. For retailers, this means creating a unified shopping experience, McKee says. “The convergence of the physical and digital in retail is a trend that will only continue to become more apparent over the next decade.”