• by Masha Geller , January 28, 2002

DoubleClick Inc. today unveiled the results of a shopping study, which reveals that consumers are leveraging multiple channels to make purchasing decisions across many categories. And while the results are based solely on last year’s holiday shopping season, the findings can be extrapolated to the rest of the year and make a good case for ad campaign integration.

President of DoubleClick David Rosenblatt said that the results demonstrate the need for marketers to “have tools in place in order to better measure how one channel is driving sales to another channel." Tracking these results, he said, represents "an enormous opportunity for marketers if they align their promotional dollars with this trend.”

According to the findings, multi-channel shoppers, consumers who browse or purchase through more than one channel (retail store, catalog, Internet), reported using all three channels in symbiosis for browsing and purchasing over the holiday season. Consumers cited price, selection and convenience of catalogs, the speed and the 24-hour availability of the Internet, and the ability to see and sample products at retail stores, as reasons for purchasing through respective channels. However, in general, the retail channel still dominated holiday purchasing for the multi-channel consumer.

The study also found that 66% of multi-channel shoppers browse in one channel but purchase in another and in general, more women tend to be channel switchers than men: 46% of women and 43% of men browsed on the Internet and purchased at retail stores whereas 37% of women and 28% of men browsed through catalogs and purchased at retail stores.

Interestingly enough, DoubleClick says, consumers have catalogs in hand when buying online - half of those that browsed in a catalog and purchased online (53% of women and 38% of men) used a product code from the catalog.

Also, consumers that either browsed or purchased in all three transaction channels spent $995 on holiday shopping, compared with consumers who browsed or purchased in two channels ($894) and consumers who only used one channel ($591).