According to the findings of a new IBM study of more than 30,000 global consumers, the percentage of consumers willing to share their current location via GPS with retailers nearly doubled
year-over-year to 36%. 38% of consumers would provide their mobile number for the purpose of receiving text messages and 32% would share their social handles with retailers.
Jill Puleri, IBM
Retail Global Industry Leader, says "… today's consumer… conditioned by multiple industries… from healthcare to travel… expects personalized interactions across different
channels… "
The study found that the five most important omnichannel capabilities to consumers are, in order:
- Price consistency across shopping channels
- Ability
to ship items that are out of stock in the store directly to their home
- Option to track the status of an order
- Consistent product assortment across channels
- Ability to
return online purchases in the store
The report says that consumers fall into four distinct groups differentiated by their interest in and use of social, location and mobile
technologies while shopping;
- 19% of consumers surveyed lag behind the majority of the population when it came to using technology to shop
- 40% of shoppers use social, location
and mobile technologies for information gathering, but are not likely to use them to purchase products
- 29% use social, location and mobile much more extensively, for everything from
researching products to ordering goods
- 12% of consumers surveyed are classified as "Trailblazers," those who use these technologies across channels and base their choice of retailer on
whether they make that possible
Consumers are increasingly shopping online, says the report. In 2013, 84% of shoppers surveyed chose the store to make their last non-grocery purchase.
This year, that figure dropped to 72%. Surprisingly, showrooming is not behind this online growth. While more respondents showroomed this year (8% versus 6% last year), only about 30% of all online
purchases actually resulted from showrooming, a drop from nearly 50% last year. 70% of online purchases were made by shoppers that went directly to the web.
For more information, please visit IBM here.