Stores Magazine - October 2007 - (Page F9) what they trust is usually what’s worked for them before. That means there’s a pretty small margin for error in online retailing; if they tried it and it didn’t work, there’s a fairly strong likelihood that they won’t be coming back. It also seems clear that the retail community needs to gain greater insight into the role search engines play in online consumer behavior. The demographics for Google customers examined in this article apply to people who identified Google as the “website at which they shop most often” for apparel or non-apparel items, but a lot more people also make Google (or another search engine) part of their online shopping experience. Almost 91 percent of surveyed online shoppers perform online shopping research before buying in a store, and 43.3 percent say they do so regularly; these figures track fairly consistently across all demographic categories. When researching products, consumers tend to start with the search engines. Combined, the responses for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and AOL to the question “When you do online product research, where do you go first?” accounted for 35.5 percent of the total. Compare that with 6.8 percent for Amazon, 1.8 percent for Wal-Mart, 1.3 percent for “manufacturer’s website” and 1 percent for the generic “store’s website.” What this ultimately means to retailers is unclear. It does seem likely, however, that search engines will play an increasing role in the way online retailers are branded, and that a relationship analogous to the one between retailers and shopping center developers will be forged between e-tailers and search engines. It’s already there, in fact. The online leaders — Amazon is particularly adept at this — are very good at making themselves visible in a search, not just for specific products but for practically anything with which they can make a logical connection. This is an ability that will be increasingly important if, as seems likely from these figures, the search-engine-based research/refine/select online shopping model becomes more prevalent. CUSTOMER EDUCATION LEVELS NON-HS GRADUATE GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL 1-3 YEARS COLLEGE AA/PROF. BACHELOR’S GRADUATE DEGREE DEGREE STUDY Amazon.com Target.com Google.com 0.9% 1.8 0.3 14.1% 16.6 13.5 24.1% 39.4 36.3 10.4% 11.2 9.8 28.3% 19.0 21.0 22.2% 12.0 19.1 The education levels of these three groups raise the prospect that what we may be seeing isn’t so much discrete populations, but a relatively homogeneous universe of people at different stages of life and development. The Amazon and Google customer bases skew slightly higher in terms of people with bachelor’s degrees and graduate study than Target customers, but they’re also older. CUSTOMER HOUSEHOLD INCOME Amazon.com Target.com Google.com 7.1% 11.7 9.9 7.8% 12.8 2.8 11.4% 12.6 7.5 16.6% 19.8 15.9 23.6% 21.5 23.7 16.4% 12.9 14.4 11.4% 7.4 15.7 5.8% 1.2 10.1 Unlike education levels, household income paints a picture of some potentially basic disparities between Amazon and Google customers on the one hand and Target customers on the other. The greatest disparity among the three groups is the percentage of customers in the highest category, incomes of $150,000 or more. An amalgamation of the three highest income categories shows 40.2 percent of Google customers have household incomes greater than $75,000, compared with 21.5 percent of Target customers. % 40.2 gle oo of G mers to cus ave h old seh eater hou s gr 00 me nco n $75,0 i tha WWW.STORES.ORG STORES / OCTOBER 2007 F9 http://Amazon.com http://Target.com http://Google.com http://Amazon.com http://Target.com http://Google.com http://WWW.STORES.ORG
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.