41 percent of shoppers plan to spend more online this holiday season

They say there are two sides to every story and when we’re trying to predict what consumers will do it’s oh, so very true.

Last week, the National Retail Federation predicted a 4.1% increase in holiday buying this year. I’d call that cautiously optimistic. This week, PwC and Strategy& released their holiday predictions and it’s not nearly as rosy.

According to the “2014 Holiday Outlook: Top trends, consumer behaviors and implications for retailers” report, average household spend will drop from $735 in 2013 to $684 in 2014.

The problem is that darned, old economy. 72% believe that the economy is the same or worse than it was a year ago so conversely, they plan to spend the same or less than last year. That doesn’t mean they plan to buy fewer items, it just means they need to find better deals on the items they need.

In order to stretch the budget, more shoppers than ever will be using the omnichannel approach to create a shopping plan.

It all begins in early November as shoppers start searching, showrooming and making notes before all heck breaks loose on November 27. Black Friday used to be the day the flood gates opened but in 2014, 49% of consumers said they plan to head out Thanksgiving morning to begin their holiday shopping odyssey.

21% of all holiday spending will happen between now and Cyber Monday. Of course, buying will continue through December with dollars rising as we get closer to Christmas. PcW says we can expect the largest wave of spending between the 15th and the 25th. Families making under $50,000 a year will spend an average $184 during this period. Those with incomes over $50,000 will drop $489 in those same ten days.

Breaking the In-Store Habit

Since more shoppers are looking for the best value, more than ever are willing to give up old shopping habits in favor of shopping online.

PwC says there are three types of omnichannel shoppers:

• Tradeoff shoppers (39 percent) will shop around extensively and buy online if it’s cheaper
• Transitionalists (29 percent) will shop online a bit, but generally prefer traditional stores
• Digitalists (32 percent) will make online the “go to” channel for most discretionary and planned shopping

41% of those who will shop online, will be spending more than last year so we can expect online revenues to rise while brick and mortar stores take a hit.

One of the best things about shopping online is that it’s almost completely weatherproof. It might be snowing like crazy outside but it’s warm and cozy by the fire with your tablet in your lap. As long as the mailman can make it through with his deliveries, it will be a very merry, and less stressful Christmas.

Once the gifts are open and the excitement is gone, shoppers will head out for the last wave of the holiday season – the after Christmas sales. PwC says shoppers will spend an average of $23 to $83 dollars per person on highly marked down gifts and goodies

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Creating a single view of stock: five key considerations

Adopting a single view of your stock across retail channels is an essential precursor to a true multichannel strategy.

Alongside a single view of the customer, it is a fundamental foundation in integrating online and offline operations.

Even as a standalone project, a single view of stock can be highly beneficial. Understanding your stock in real-time across your retail channels can enable utilisation of innovative fulfilment models: click and collect, multichannel returns, as well as new and valuable customer service and merchandising solutions.

Whilst understanding your stock may sound simple, it can be quite the opposite.

This is particularly relevant in environments where offline and online retail functions have developed as essentially independent businesses, as is the case for many clicks-and-mortar retailers.

In these scenarios, store distribution warehouses might operate entirely separately from online fulfilment, with in-store stock tracked separately from its online equivalent and even online and offline returns accounted for differently.

Improving Customer Experience Leads Big Data Priorities

There is no question that businesses see the value in Big Data—but putting that info to work is a different story. According to a June 2013 survey from compTIA, an IT industry association, more than 78% of US business and IT executives agreed that if they could harness their data, they’d be a much stronger business. And nearly as many said data was one of their firm’s greatest assets. But just slightly fewer respondents—73%—also conceded that converting the volumes of data into actionable intelligence remained a challenge.

The primary goal execs see Big Data serving is helping improve the customer experience. That was the top response among IT and business leaders worldwide in a June 2013 survey from Gartner, followed by achieving process efficiency. In this study as well, putting Big Data to work was the biggest challenge posed by the information onslaught.

Consumers more concerned about mobile privacy than a phone’s brand or screen size

A TRUSTe survey of 900 smartphone users has found that battery life is the primary concern for 45% of smartphone users when using mobile apps, followed by privacy (20%), brand (13%)  and screen size (11%).

Furthermore, 54% of smartphone users are frequently or always concerned about privacy when banking online, the online activity causing mobile users the greatest concern, followed by shopping online (50%).

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What Indian Internet Businesses Need: Article in CIO featuring Ritesh Raj Gupta

It is estimated that around 3.74 lakh tickets are booked on IRCTC in a day. Despite the reported sluggishness of the site, it is the best possible proof of the Internet’s growing popularity and dependence in India.  

India has around 150 million Internet users, and that’s just at a mere 12 percent penetration rate. Despite that, it is the third-largest Internet population in the world, behind China and the U.S. New online retailers are mushrooming virtually every month, and growth in Internet usage is mainly driven by mobile, social, and tablet usage.

Till now, Internet in India was just a numbers game. But that’s about to change.

E-commerce giants around the country are struggling to please an uber-demanding and price-sensitive market, while keeping a competitive edge. The general lack of infrastructure pertaining to logistics, distribution, and highly available and cost-effective bandwidth in India is soon set to make the business model unsustainable.

In the current ecosystem, businesses report high costs of logistics and servicing clients. Inadequate systems for online payment and transaction further hinder the experience for users. And finally, cheap and easy access to Internet is still a distant dream.

CIOs in the industry are increasingly turning to BI, analytics, and mobility solutions to identify the gaps in customer experience, and turning to IT to fill those gaps. But, in this game, the government of India is a very crucial player. And, as is evident from the growing numbers of IRCTC, it will alsagazineo be the biggest gainer.

The CIO magazine spoke to the CIOs of some of India’s leading e-commerce companies regarding what India’s Internet businesses need, and this is what they said:

Ritesh Raj Gupta, Vice President, AaramShop

“Internet-driven business is an opportunity that needs to be tapped into by every physical business. Internet has to be one of the key channels in a multi-channel strategy. For us at AaramShop, therefore, grocery retailing on the Internet is not the preserve of a few, but the opportunity which has to be made available to millions of retailers across the country and their consumers.”

Ranjit Satyanath, Customer Care Associate and Sr. General Manager, Solutions and Technology, Shoppers Stop

“Currently, people buy things online for convenience and discounts. While the former benefit should continue into the future, online players won’t be able sustain giving discounts for very long. They are now trying to differentiate themselves on assortment, user-experience and quality of service.

The challenge facing the industry today is the general lack of infrastructure in the country with respect to distribution and logistics. Add to that the Quixotic tax regime we have inIndia. Online retailers are also finding it tough to attract and retain talent because in our country, startups are generally perceived as risky career options and not without good reason—this is often reflected in the user-experience on Indian sites. I also think that Indian online retailers give more importance to features than to design and user-experience.”

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How do consumers research and purchase your products?

This tool could help identify new opportunities for your business and show the senior execs in your business how consumers in your market are typically interacting between the online and the offline world when making a decision on which product to buy and where to buy it from.

The data behind the research is compiled by TNS, the IAB and Google (in case you are questioned on the credibility of this data).

The consumer barometer tool is split into four key areas each of which could go some way to help guide you answer some burning business questions regarding the multichannel shopping habits of your customers and strong the ROPO effect is in your market.

1. How do consumers research and purchase the products you sell?

The internet and search engines have completely changed the way we go about making everyday purchase decisions.

It is widely accepted that people will often research online but then prefer to go into a store to make a final purchase. And this varies person to person, product to product, situation to situation etc.

However, this concept has been difficult to quantify and prove and often talking about this with senior managers can often leave us internet people feeling slightly frustrated.  This is a credible source of research and data that can help you demonstrate to the business how your customers are shopping for products you sell.

Firstly select your country from the nicely presented bubbles. Then you can use the menu on the left to filter down to your product area or industry e.g. digital cameras/camcorders. 

The next stage is pretty cool. You are presented with a matrix of results on which you can compare and filter to identify differences between countries, genders, education levels etc. 

In the snap shot below I have compared UK to USA markets and filtered on Male gender.

Straight away it is easy for me to demonstrate that consumers in both the UK and USA conduct the majority of their research on the internet.

You can also see that 60% of consumers shopping for cameras in the UK purchase online but it is important to note that a high percentage of people who research online go on to make the final purchase and part with their cash in store.

This demonstrates the importance of your website and your online marketing strategy to the final sale in the offline world. Maybe you should consider identifying the key online activity that helps consumers buying offline.

Set this up as a micro conversion rate in your analytics and focus on activity to drive more of this.

2. What is the role of the search engine in the purchase process?

This part of the consumer barometer will help you demonstrate to your directors how important search is for potential customers trying to find products you sell. Simply follow your nose in the navigation to locate your country, product, industry etc. You can also see the differences between different genders, ages and education levels.

If the percentages are high for your market then maybe you need investment in SEO and technical web development to keep the PPC costs down. You may also find something interesting that helps you tailor your ad copy to appeal more to different genders. 

3. How do your consumers access the internet?

This section gives you an overview of the proportion of people that have access the Internet, how they access it and the type of connection consumers have.

A couple of really nice metrics in this section is the intent to buy by device and the psychographic segmentation. This enables you to explore comparisons across different geographical regions. This data could help you to understand the opportunity for expansion into new markets and the channels and devices you should be focussing development and investment on. 

Both of these geographical markets are very similar so maybe not a great example here. If you were considering entering a new geographical market then it would be great to understand how important it is to have a mobile optimised website.

Or if connection speeds and broadband penetration low in your chosen market then your website would need to be light on images and tags to help pages load quicker.  

4. How does purchase behaviour vary across geographic regions?

This little section is great once again for helping you plan potential expansion into new markets. After selecting your product area you can easily see the importance of search engines and mobile optimisation across geographical regions.

Hopefully this will be an annual project and when the data is refreshed we can also begin to see how trends and shopping habits change over time.  

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IAB study reveals 54% increase in mobile optimisation amongst top 100 brands

Research released this week by the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB) shows a significant increase in the top 100 brands optimising their websites for mobile in the past six months.

The second wave of the IAB’s mobile optimisation study reveals that 57% of the top 100 brands now have a mobile optimised site, up from 37%. 

This represents a 54% in six months.

The research revealed that the sectors with the most significant percentage increase in mobile marketing over the last six months are FMCG (up 267%), media (up 150%) and tech & telecoms (up 150%). Looking at the sectors with the greatest degree of mobile optimisation,  FMCG again comes out on top with 79% of the 14 sites listed being optimised, followed closely by automotive with 73% of the 26 sites listed being optimised.

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Justifying Smartphone PPC Spend as Tablet Results Soar

There's no doubt that tablet ownership is growing month-on-month in the U.S., UK and other markets, with a predictable surge having taken place this Christmas.

The range of desirable tablets at varying price points has grown – the iPad doesn't stand alone as the only attractive option. Traffic figures back up this growth – and crucially for marketers, conversion rates do, too. Tablets accounted for 18.02 percent of UK PPC clicks and 18.31 percent of conversions, according to data released by Kenshoo.

Mobile, by comparison, accounted for 13 percent of the searches but only 3.62 percent of the conversions – and that variance is the challenge some marketers are having to deal with.

While tablet budgets increase, there is a growing trend of marketers being challenged internally by colleagues to justify mobile spend given the (comparative) low ROI it can bring. Should mobile be sidelined, the argument goes, and funds pumped into tablet and "normal" search?

14 intriguing ways to use QR codes

Whatever your opinion on QR codes, you have to admit they have permeated the digital space with a vengeance. They are somewhat controversial, but remain a hot topic, especially among digital marketers. 

The question is, how should we use these enigmatic little blobs of code? 

 

The boring examples include scavenger hunts, restaurant menus, wine bottles, T-shirts, rewards, free downloads, links to websites, and more. But here we are going to explore the more unusual and creative uses of QR codes, from brands and organizations alike.

3 Cutting Edge Social Media Sites That Are Changing E-Commerce

Consider the ways in which we spend our time online: social networking, searching, perusing content, emailing, indulging in multi-media, and online shopping.

In theory, the more needs a site can cater to – while still being focused and navigable – the more time a user will spend on the site.

It’s no surprise, then, that the best social shopping sites on the market broach a number of our online activities, and eliminate our needs for other sites in the process. The goal is to satisfy the most needs with the least amount of effort by the user.

How do you do that?

• Simplify – a picture is worth 1000 words, especially when you’re targeting female customers. A picture also occupies much less real estate than 1000 words on a page.

• Streamline –  if a user sees a product they like, they likely want to A) share it with friends, and/or B) buy it. Platforms that allow online consumers to see and share images of products they like are the fastest growing aspect of ecommerce.

The following three sites take this one step further, allowing users to purchase products in the same place where they see and share them.

1. Fancy

Description – “The Minimalist Niche”

Fancy allows users to browse feeds of product and editorial imagery aggregated from other sites via a “Fancy It” bookmark button. Once on site, users can follow friends, create lists, and shop for items spanning myriad categories. The site is constantly fresh with beautiful imagery of new, unique products, all the while being fun to engage with.

The more you items you “fancy” on the site, the better your recommendations become. Each week, you’ll receive “The Fancy Five” in your email inbox, containing “wonderful things picked just for you.

The Bottom Line: Fancy is a beautiful site of beautifully photographed products that would rarely otherwise be found without exhausting hours perusing niche blogs and sites on the regular.

2. Lyst

Description – “Smart, Organized, Specific”

At first glance, Lyst resembles a more traditional fashion-oriented e-commerce site, with top navigation including links to What’s New, Men, Women, and Designers. The catch is the site’s has a social angle that helps you discover the best fashion for you, based on your preferences. Lyst’s stylefeed keeps you up to date with the latest and greatest from your favorite designers, boutiques, bloggers, and stylists, all of whom you can elect to follow on the site.

The end result is a one-stop-shop where you can search, shop, “influence and be influenced,” all in one place. You can even subscribe to instant sales alerts on products saved to your lyst. Just to be sure you really don’t need to leave the site, Lyst also allows you to link your Pinterest account.

The Bottom Line: For the shoppers who love the organization of department store caliber e-commerce stores, but lack the inspiration or direction to navigate wide product assortments on their own, Lyst is dreamlike.

 3. Pose

Description -”The Social Mobile App and Online Shopping Marriage”

Pose is a mobile app similar to Instagram’s user-uploaded photo feeds with comment threads, but it enabled users to attach brand names to items pictured. As opposed to seeing something you like and simply admiring or wondering.

Pose’s functionality gives you enough information to go the item yourself. Just this week, though, Pose removed that big search step, bringing their platform online and extending it to include shopping functionality straight from the tagged products in users’ photo feeds. Pose’s new online shopping layout is also tried-and-true: nearly identical to that of Pinterest.

The Bottom Line: If you ever desired to buy something you saw on Instagram or Pinterest, look no further.

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Why the Future of Pinterest is Stuff Magazine

Pinterest is a (burst) bubble without a viable business model.  The magazine industry has a dead business model.  But together, the two could combine to create next generation of profitable social commerce.

In a nutshell, Fréd, prolific blogger and author of one of the best presentations to date on social commerce, suggests that the next phase in social commerce is curation via a creative combination of “blogging and boarding” – curated and personalized product selections (powered by a next-generation social recommender system) that combines Pinterest-style boards with editorial content.  Ultimately these may evolve into virtual shop assistants with a ‘meta-basket’ allowing shoppers to add products from different vendors as they browse.

From this perspective, the problem that social commerce solves is that it reduces choice by filtering out the junk and presenting users with a personalised range of options – informed  by the selections and opinions of others.  In other words social commerce makes shoppers smarter by acting as a smart intermediary between vendors and shoppers.

Whilst social shopping apps such as ThisNext, Fantasy Shopper, Fashiolista ou Shopcade may come to mind, what comes to mind for us is Stuff Magazine, the FT’s brilliant How to Spend it app, or even the lowly Consumer Reports/WhichMagazine.

One part Flipboard, one-part Pinterest and one part Stuff magazine is the recipe for the next social commerce success story.

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