Commentary

Consumer Behavior Takes Search On Roller-Coaster Ride, Per Salesforce Data

Retail website traffic rose 6% in the past year and digital commerce rose 14%, which means searches on sites picked up as well.

The findings from The Salesforce Commerce Cloud's Q2 2017 Shopping Index analyze the online behavior of 500 million global shoppers, highlighting the ways in which digital commerce continues to grow.

Canada experienced the highest growth at 41%, followed by Australia and New Zealand at 35%.

Overall, shoppers spent 8% more worldwide and mobile traffic share jumped to 57%, up 23% YoY.

Some 59% of consumers reported using their phones while shopping in a physical store within the last three months. Social traffic rose 42% YoY, driving 6% of mobile traffic.

Among the shopping verticals tracked by Salesforce, active apparel saw the biggest increase -- nearly double the overall growth when analyzing numbers in shopping verticals. Luxury apparel was the only vertical that fell.

advertisement

advertisement

In another global report from Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Sapient Razorfish titled Shopper-First Retailing report, some 60% of about 300 million shoppers in six countries say they begin their search for products on digital media such as online marketplace, retailer and brand sites or apps, search engines, and social media. Just 37% start in a physical store.

But when you break out search engines from the digital bucket and compare this with physical stores, the findings may be surprising. In the U.S., 39% still begin their hunt for products in the physical retail store, compared with 15% in search engines and 24% in retail, brand sites or apps.

Overall, some 20% of visitors are either buy or show signs of buying behavior, like searching, adding products to a cart, and starting checkouts.

Social media appears to introduce the products to consumers, but it's not where consumers make purchases. The findings show social traffic rose 60% since 2015, but only 1% of all site orders start in social media channels, whereas 15% of all site orders begin in search.

Bots, particularly in chat, should "greatly" reduce the frustration associated with customer service on retail websites, according to findings from the study. But most retailers say they are in the wait-and-see mode.

The findings show that shoppers using site search account for 9% of all visits, which over-indexes to drive 23% of all digital sales. Retailers also are keeping a close eye on voice-based searches, since Google reported earlier this year that voice triggers about 20% of searches. 

Next story loading loading..