Stores Magazine - October 2007 - (Page F13) The reasoning appears to be that people in the 25 to 34 group are, for the most part, out of college, working and raising young families: They don’t have a lot of free time, they’re feeling over-stressed and they respond well to anything that will make things easier. They’re budgetconscious, too, but that appears to play a lesser role: the differential in a “very important” rating for low prices was significantly smaller than the one for free shipping, for example. Shipping, particularly shipping returns, is a hassle, and not having to pay for it makes it more appealing. What does this mean for retailers and their online strategies? Let’s look at the way people shop. In another series of questions, respondents were asked how often they performed online product research before making an in-store purchase, and what kinds of products they researched. Nearly one-third of women (30.1 percent) research shoes online and one-quarter research electronics before buying in stores. So if you’re trying to sell clothes or TVs to 30-year-old women and your site is confusing or hard to use, there is a barrier between you and your target market. If your site is hard to use and you don’t offer free shipping and have a flexible returns policy, that barrier might as well be battlements and a moat. And remember: This is what people do online before making a purchase in a store, so your website could be hurting you in ways that would never show up in the online sales revenue figures. Still, while operating multiple sales channels increases the opportunities to make mistakes, it also provides more opportunities to make it easy and desirable for online browsers to turn into online or in-store customers. Here’s a closer look at some of those opportunities. PICK UP OR RETURN AT STORE 5.8% 37.5% 26.4% 7.1% TOLL-FREE “LIVE” CUSTOMER SERVICE PERSON 6.0% 38.9% 23.2% 9.5% WEBSITE EASY TO USE 4.3% 46.7% 3.8% 16.7% 28.5% 23.3% 22.4% This service was rated “very important” by the lowest overall percentage of respondents (37.5 percent) and had a relatively high “not at all important” score (5.8 percent). However, it’s a lot more important – by 10.3 percentage points — to 25- to 34-year-olds than it is to the 18-to-24 group. And if you combine the number of people giving it a 4 (almost but not quite “very important”) with those giving it a 5, you get a solid majority: 63.9 percent overall, 66.5 percent for the time-pressured 25-to-34 age group. Again, for retailers wanting to differentiate on convenience, this could be an important service. Yet another area that’s much more important to women (44.5 percent) than men (33.1 percent). As a random check to see how committed online retailers are to service, we visited the websites of the 10 highest-ranking retailers in the Favorite 50 in search of customer service phone numbers. Best Buy’s was the easiest to find, being on the home page; the rest required a few clicks. (Two of the top 10, eBay and Google, aren’t exactly retailers and don’t have customer service numbers readily available.) Another much bigger issue for women (52.8 percent) than for men (40.3 percent). It scores lowest overall with 18- to 24-year-olds (37.6 percent) – a demographic that contains a large number of tech-oriented male consumers who are extremely difficult to discourage. If you sell videogames or snowboards, you can probably get away with having a gnarly website; if, on the other hand, you’re selling cosmetics or young women’s apparel, you simply cannot. Source: BIGresearch/STORES WWW.STORES.ORG STORES / OCTOBER 2007 F13 http://WWW.STORES.ORG
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