In the final run up to Christmas, we thought it was worth rounding up some relevant insights for ecommerce website owners:
- According to GSI Commerce a quarter of people are now willing to spend more than £1000 on a product online this year compared with just 12% in 2008. This underlines the rise in consumer confidence in online shopping.
- GSI also report that consumers are not yet ready to purchase products via social networks such as Facebook (only 9% said they would be likely to do so). But don’t give up on social networks…….if we go back to our first point above, who would have said 10 years ago that 25% of consumers would be willing to spend more than £1000 online on any one purchase?
- GSI say that email promotions are most likely to provoke shoppers to make an impulse purchase and that Free Shipping (we’ve talked about this on this blog many times before) is the most important factor in their purchase decision.
Free Shipping As A Promotional Tool
- In a separate survey from BDO Seidman in the US, 55% of ecommerce website owners said that email promotions would be at the top of their list for Xmas marketing and Free shipping was the second most important marketing activity (just above search engine optimisation).
- McAfee, the web security specialists, in an analysis of shopping cart abandonment (100m ecommerce visits were analysed) have found that on average there is a delay of nearly 34 hours between a consumer’s first visit to an ecommerce website and the time that they actually make a purchase. So have faith…..all those abandoned shopping carts may just turn into sales!
