The Mall in the Family Room
Study shows online shopper gains in software, book purchases.
If you are a marketer of books, airline tickets, or computer software, you might give extra thought to using the Internet for your next promotion. That’s the word from Westport, CT-based Web researcher Greenfield Online, based on its latest study of online usage.
The Web is gaining in popularity chiefly because of its ease and convenience, says Margot Turk, Greenfield director of syndicated services. And in the case of the aforementioned categories, “a Web promo is perfect,” she says.
Internet users control 60 percent of the buying power of the total U.S. population, another reason to think of promoting on the Web,” says Rudy Nadilo, Greenfield ceo.
But if an item is personal to a customer’s lifestyle, like apparel or cosmetics, the pleasure of touching and handling the product – “the first-hand experience of shopping” – still far outweighs any appeal for shopping on the Web, Turk says.
Greenfield’s ongoing study, Shopping 2000, polls some 1,300 people twice a year to track the Internet’s effect on popular consumer shopping attitudes and behavior. Subjects are drawn from an Internet-user panel of nearly one million people. Here’s what Greenfield has to report about certain online categories
Software. While the tendency to window-shop online is about the same as at local stores – 70 percent of respondents compared to 71 percent, respectively – the Internet still trails the local store (49% vs. 68%) as the place where consumers who shop online make their actual software purchases. But 49 percent now purchase software on the Internet, as opposed to 42 percent who prefer to buy in malls or 22 percent who prefer to purchase from catalogs.
Soft Goods. Shopping for apparel online is now almost as popular as shopping in catalogs. Thirty-eight percent of consumers still leaf through catalogs, contrasted with 30 percent who browse online. Yet malls and local stores are still the rule for window shopping, preferred by 75 percent of respondents.
When it comes to making actual purchases online, 18 percent of shoppers choose the Web, putting it close to catalogs at 22 percent. But online and catalog retailers are still not as popular as malls and local stores when it comes to an actual buy.
Books. The real online retail success story remains books, where one out of two Internet-enabled people are buying online. In fact, online book marketers are poised to surpass mall bookstores. Forty-nine percent of consumers say they are just as likely to make actual purchases online as opposed to 51 percent who still prefer to buy at the mall. But reports of the demise of local bookstores are still premature, the study says. Some 63 percent of consumers still go to their local bookstores to buy their books, but they do as much browsing for availability and price online as they do at the store – 64 percent versus 63 percent, respectively.
