Choice is great, but at times it can also be overwhelming. Wine.com’s customers, who are not oenology experts, felt confused when they went to the site to buy wine. With such a wide selection of vineyards and varietals, they sometimes found the process of choosing a bottle unwieldy.
To further compound matters, about half of the wine retailer’s customers buy gifts when they visit the site, says Cam Fortin, Wine.com’s director of business development. This statistic added pressure on the company to help customers make the right choice.
Paco Underhill, retail expert and author, reveals the influences behind purchasing decisions and RichRelevance CEO David Selinger explains how his technology for retailers is staying relevant with the emergence of mobile, local and social.
Q: You’re the author of the global bestselling book ‘Why We Buy’. How did you become an expert in the psychology and science of shopping?
Envirosell, the firm I founded, is the principal testing agency for prototype stores and bank branches in the world. We have studied shopping and circulation patterns for more than 25 years.
Q: In your research what three things most often influence a purchasing decision?
First is the perception of value: is what I am considering worth the amount of money I am being asked to spend? Second, how does what I am buying fit into both the needs I have, or anticipated impact I am looking for? And third, is the experience of shopping one that complements both the goods I am considering, and my concept of self?
RichRelevance Chief Scientist Darren Vengroff reflects on how Amazon changed retailing in UK’s Retail Week.
Amazon’s impact on retail has been remarkable. Its focus on technology and new ideas have produced innovations that set the bar for the industry.
Read the full article on Retail Week
RichRelevance, which provides personalization services to 28 retailers in the 2012 Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, said this week that it raised $20 million in a funding round.
RichRelevance will use some of the capital to fund expansion into new markets outside of North America, says chief marketing officer Diane Kegley. The company also plans to develop more personalization and digital marketing tools, beef up its consumer data analysis efforts and also add staff
RichRelevance first expanded internationally in 2010 in the United Kingdom by signing office supply merchant Viking Direct, a segment of Office Depot and No. 60 in the 2012 Internet Retailer Top 400 Europe.
Econsultancy recaps on the latest 2012 Q1 UK Mobile Study revealing differences in m-commerce on both sides of the Atlantic.
It seems that the UK’s shoppers have adapted to mobile shopping more than their US counterparts. In the UK, mobile accounts for 9.1% of all e-commerce sales, compared with 4.6% across the pond.
These stats come from RichRelevance’s 2012 Q1 Shopping Insights Mobile Study, and are based on more than 1.1bn shopping sessions on UK and US retail websites (including mass merchants, as well as small and specialty retailers) up to 25 March 2012.
Here are some highlights from the study, and well as an infographic summarising the key findings…
Mobile commerce continues to grow
- In March, mobile accounted for 9.1% of all UK e-commerce sales, up from 8.2% since Christmas.
- In March, the average purchase on mobile was £109.68 compared to £100.05 on desktop.
- As indicated by other stats we have seen, iPads are a big deal. The iPad accounted for 82% of all mobile spend.
- Unlike previous stats average order values (AOV) in March were highest on iPhones.
- March iPhone purchases averaged £135.63 compared to £119 on other mobile devices, £111.41 on the iPad and £107.70 on desktop.
Conversion rates
- Not surprisingly, conversion rates were highest on desktop, at 3.6% in March.
- The iPad was next, with 2.9%, followed by iPhone (1.2%) and other devices (1%).
iPad users shop for longer
- Shoppers on the iPad viewed the most pages, logging an average of 9.89 pageviews per session in March compared to 8.86 pages on desktop, 5.16 pages on other mobile devices and 4.34 pages on iPhones.
- The iPad’s share of shopping sessions (viewing, not necessarily buying) increases on the weekends, reaching 10% compared to 8.2% during the week.
- The peak days for shopping on iPad are Wednesday and Sunday, during which 11% of shopping sessions happened on the device.
- The iPad’s share of sessions is greater during evenings, with peaks at 4pm, 8pm and 10pm.
- This suggests greater use of the device during leisure time, possibly as a second screen.
UK and US habits compared
- Brits were nearly twice as likely to spend on mobile as Americans, where mobile accounted for only 4.6% of revenue.
- For US shoppers, the average order value in March was $158 for iPad compared with $105 for other mobile devices and $104 for iPhone (and other iOS devices).
- The share of shopping sessions on iPads also rose in the US on weekends, though it only reached 7% on weekends compared to 5% during the week.
RichRelevance’s recent mobile study was cited on Smart Money’s “10 Things Your iPad Won’t Say”
Apple users tend to be bigger spenders than other tablet owners — they forked over an average $123 in purchases on their iPads and iPhones, compared to an average $101 spent by Android users, according to a separate survey by RichRelevance, a personalized product recommendation company.
The portability of the iPad, combined with the overall pleasant browsing experience allows for more instant gratification, says Darren Vengroff, chief scientist for RichRelevance. “There’s no remembering to go to the mall on the weekends to buy those jeans you liked,” he says. People tend to use their tablets in relaxed environments like their homes, which might cause them to spend more, according to a report by Adobe Digital Index, which found that tablet users spend 20% more per purchase than people shopping on computers. Tablet owners also tend to be more affluent than most online consumers, according to the report.
Retailers act swiftly to engage consumers armed with smart phones and other mobile devices. ANA Magazine talks to Diane Kegley, RichRelevance CMO.
“Mobile is becoming the cornerstone of how retailers and brands engage with consumers,” says Diane Kegley, CMO at RichRelevance, a San Francisco-based company that analyzes online shopping patterns. “From the consumer standpoint this is being driven by what we call the ubiquity of screens. Consumers are neither online or offline, they are just always connected.”
Internet Retailer cites RichRelevance’s mobile study as the latest version of the iPad is set to be announced.
…iPad owners are retail carnivores. 92% of non-desktop online sales originated from an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch in December 2011, up from 88% in April 2011, says personalization vendor RichRelevance Inc. It studied 3.4 billion shopping sessions on its retailer clients’ sites between April and December 2011. What’s more, shoppers using Apple mobile devices have a larger average order value compared with other mobile platforms—$123 for Apple versus $101 for Android in December 2011. And that far outstrips the desktop average order value of $87.
And the tablet and smartphone shoppers just keep on coming. The share of U.S. online retail dollars attributable to mobile devices has doubled from 1.87% in April 2011 to 3.74% in December 2011, RichRelevance finds. Further, in April 2011 just under 9% of all shoppers were browsing retail sites on a mobile device. By December 2011, that share more than doubled, reaching 18 percent of all consumers.
This is all good news for e-retailers, but especially for those that are prepared for iPad owners. And many retailers are on the right track with mobile commerce.