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On The Couch: Understanding Consumer Shopping Behavior

Three factors are influencing modern consumer shopping behavior: research, recommendations, and returns. Consumers now do extensive research online before purchases, accessing more product information than ever before. They also rely heavily on peer recommendations and reviews over retailer-generated content when deciding what to buy. Returns have also become a normal part of shopping for consumers. Retailers must adapt to this new consumer-empowered landscape by understanding shoppers' decision-making processes and creating positive customer experiences.

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37 views2 pages

On The Couch: Understanding Consumer Shopping Behavior

Three factors are influencing modern consumer shopping behavior: research, recommendations, and returns. Consumers now do extensive research online before purchases, accessing more product information than ever before. They also rely heavily on peer recommendations and reviews over retailer-generated content when deciding what to buy. Returns have also become a normal part of shopping for consumers. Retailers must adapt to this new consumer-empowered landscape by understanding shoppers' decision-making processes and creating positive customer experiences.

Uploaded by

marios.charalambous
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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On the couch

Understanding consumer shopping behavior


What makes retail consumers prefer one venue over another? How
does increased access to information influence shopping and spending
choices? Three Rs—research, recommendations, and returns—may
hold the key to understanding consumers.


The chasm between online retail and its brick-and-mortar counterpart is expanding, and
people’s shopping preferences are evolving in turn. For storefronts, traffic and sales are
declining, leaving retailers with little choice but to adapt to an interconnected world and to
their customers’ shifting expectations of the shopping experience. A great deal of research
focuses on how consumers shop, but the rationale behind their chosen behaviors remains
somewhat underserved. This article bridges that gap by capturing consumers’ decision-
making processes—in their own words, from in-depth interviews, and combining these
insights with secondary research that adds context, resulting in a closer look into the minds
of modern retail consumers.

The shopping journey and its Rs

THREE factors are evolving the shopping process and empowering consumers. Lucky for us,
they all begin with the letter R: research, recommendations, and returns.

Research

The proliferation of digital technology is giving consumers access to an unprecedented


amount of product information. Not only is more information available, consumers are
increasingly accessing this information—and doing their own “homework” before visiting a
retailers’ venue to make their purchase. In 2014, a Deloitte study found that digital data
influenced 49 percent of consumers before they made an in-store purchase, and analysts
expect this proportion to grow to 64 percent in 2015. For some categories, particularly
electronics (62 percent) and home furnishings (59 percent), destination shoppers (who have
already chosen which product they want to buy from a retailer) are outnumbering
traditional information gatherers who browse in stores before deciding what to buy.

Recommendations and reviews

Historically, consumers lost their leverage once they made a purchase. That is no longer the
case: Retailer-sponsored content— advertisements, user guides, retailer blogs, etc.—are
losing out to user-generated content and reviews as the predominant influencers of
purchase decisions. Consumers feel more comfortable searching online and reading expert
reviews and user opinions as a first step in gathering initial information about a product or
service. As evidence, Deloitte’s Digital Democracy survey reveals that personal
recommendations (81 percent), including those from within social-media circles (61
percent), play a major role in purchase decisions.

Returns

Returns have become both a normal part of the shopping process and business as usual for
retailers, representing a little over 8 percent of retail sales. When it comes to returns,
dissatisfaction isn’t the only driver— other factors, such as buyer’s remorse, are consumer
driven. Another driver of returns is the fact that consumers don’t always evaluate the
product (e.g., trying on the item) prior to purchase.

Research, recommendations and reviews, and returns are toppling traditional shopping and
empowering consumers at each phase of the purchase process. Astute retailers, in turn, are
creating opportunities to resonate in the hearts and minds of their consumers. Connecting,
however, is necessary but insufficient. The interviews in this report capture snapshots of the
underlying reasons why consumers choose one retailer over another and how they recall
the customer experience.

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