Dive Brief:
- SmartCommerce identified a trend among online versus in-store shoppers in a recent survey: Consumers don’t make a shopping list when buying groceries and personal care items online nearly as much as they do when they shop at a grocery or drug store.
- While 79% of in-store shoppers make a shopping list before they visit, just under half (49%) of consumers make a list when buying those items online. Instead, nearly a quarter (23.5%) of U.S. consumers create their online shopping lists directly in their carts at the time they think about it.
- Manufacturers can capitalize on this consumer shopping trend by improving accessibility to products online and making it easier to browse and add products to an online cart, just like the consumer would in the store.
Dive Insight:
To improve accessibility, manufacturers can offer shopping cart options near every digital touchpoint, SmartCommerce suggests. Convenience is just as important to the online shopping process as it is to the desirability of the food or beverage product itself.
That includes digital touchpoints on a retailer’s or manufacturer’s website, but brands can also target social media efforts at driving e-commerce sales. Marketers already know that social media can highly influence purchase decisions. But as the technology evolves, brands can also find ways to utilize social media for direct purchasing or connecting consumers to a retail cart hosted elsewhere.
Touchpoints may occur along three primary shopping patterns. These include impulse buys, habitual purchases and decisions requiring more extensive research, according to the Advertising Research Association. Manufacturers can use big data collected from browsing and purchase history to make suggestions for impulse buys as consumers shop online. Brands could offer frequent online customers special coupons to encourage continued loyalty. Or manufacturers can provide more information online to help guide consumers to a brand's products as the consumer researches other options.