In conjunction with a new monthly e-commerce tracking initiative, Shopzilla has released research from a survey of online shoppers conducted immediately after their purchases from the Bizrate Insights Network of more than 5,200 e-commerce retailers in the US and Canada. The data shows that buyers were most likely to have first seen their most recent online purchase while surfing around online (29%) or when looking to find something specific (25%). Beyond those top 2 points of inspiration, store emails (11%) emerged as a key source, cited by more respondents than magazines (8%), ads (6%), blogs and other web content sites (4%).
Interestingly, Pinterest was the source of inspiration for less than 1% of the online buyers surveyed. That’s despite separate research from Bizrate Insights indicating that among online shoppers who use Pinterest, 70% said they do so to get inspiration on what to buy. That may indicate that while Pinterest users are there for shopping inspiration, these consumers represent only a small subset of the online buying population.
Meanwhile, in the latest research, Twitter also acted as an inspiration for less than 1% of the buyers, while only 2% first saw the item they bought on Facebook. Predictably, younger buyers were more likely to cite Facebook as a source of inspiration, with 4% of Gen Yers doing so. Store emails were less of an inspiration to the younger generation, with about 8% saying an email was where they first saw the product they purchased. The likelihood of store emails being a source of inspiration tended to rise with age, as did the influence of advertisements.
Other Findings:
- 78% of respondents said they did not look at the product they bought in a store before buying it.
- Orders were most often placed from home (79%) or the office (17%).
- 85% of respondents used a desktop or laptop to make their purchase, with an iPad (11%) the next most commonly used device.
- Three-quarters said price was an influence in their purchase. 8 in 10 said the store they bought from offered the best all-around price, while 60% bought an item that was on sale and one-third used coupons.
About the Data: Data for the study was collected from more than 9,000 online buyers from April 24-30, 2013.
