Stores Magazine - October 2007 - (Page F8) WHO’S SHOPPING WHERE ing. No. 9 Google isn’t a retailer – which indicates that its customers are so comfortable with the search engine that they consider it their home base for online shopping. That Amazon and Target are partners in an extensive, long-running joint venture might lead one to conclude that their respective customers have a good deal in common. As it turns out, they don’t: In fact, Amazon customers are more like Google customers than Target customers. This is almost certainly because Target is, well, targeted: it’s trying to attract bargain hunters who also have an elevated sense of style. The demographics of its online customers — and its presence near the top of the Favorite 50 — indicate that it’s doing a pretty good job. What lessons are there for retailers in these demographic profiles? One, made obvious not just here but throughout, is that people become website loyalists: They return time and again to that which they trust, and ust as they do in traditional bricks-and-mortar retailing, the demographics – and, by extension, the behavior, needs and expectations — of online consumers vary widely. To gain an appreciation of just how much variance there can be, here’s a detailed look at the customer characteristics of three etailers that ranked near the top of the Favorite 50. These retailers vary as much as their customers. No. 1 Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer. No. 6 Target is a large, aggressively marketed big-box chain, as well as an Amazon joint-venture partner in online retail- J CUSTOMERS BY AGE 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65+ CUSTOMERS BY GENDER MALE FEMALE Amazon.com Target.com Google.com 16.9% 30.8 8.8 27.1% 22.9 11.3 20.6% 21.1 11.8 18.0% 13.0 20.7 9.4% 8.2 17.9 8.1% 4.0 29.5 Amazon.com Target.com Google.com 53.4% 27.4 58.2 46.6% 72.6 41.8 Almost 31 percent of Target’s customers — nearly twice as many as Amazon and more than three times as many as Google’s — are 18-to-24 years old. Combining the two youngest age brackets throws the difference into even sharper relief: 53.7 percent of Target customers are under 35 years of age, compared with 44 percent of Amazon customers and 20.1 percent of the Google base. The same disparity appears at the senior end of the age spectrum: People 55 or older make up only 17.5 percent of the Amazon customer base and 12.2 percent of Target customers, but represent nearly half (47.4 percent) of Google shoppers. Here’s one basic similarity between customers of Amazon and Google: the majority of them, and by very similar percentages, are men. Target’s customer base, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly female. Most of the top 10 retailers in the Favorite 50 have majority-female customer bases (the only other exception is Best Buy), but only Overstock (71.8 percent) and JCPenney (61.2) came close to skewing as heavily female as Target. CUSTOMER MARITAL STATUS MARRIED LIVING WITH UNMARRIED PARTNER DIVORCED OR SEPARATED WIDOWED SINGLE, NEVER MARRIED Amazon.com Target.com Google.com 47.4% 42.7 65.3 8.8% 15.0 2.2 9.1% 9.7 14.4 2.1% 4.4 5.4 32.7% 28.4 12.7 Source: BIGresearch/STORES Though fairly heavily differentiated by gender, Amazon and Target shoppers show more similarity in terms of marital status than either customer base does to the universe of Google shoppers. WWW.STORES.ORG F8 STORES / OCTOBER 2007 http://Amazon.com http://Amazon.com http://Target.com http://Target.com http://Google.com http://Google.com http://Amazon.com http://Target.com http://Google.com http://WWW.STORES.ORG
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