Changing consumer shopping habits are creating unexpected challenges and opportunities for retailers as digital and physical commerce channels become increasingly interconnected. Research from Mercator Advisory Group suggests that despite rapid growth in e-commerce and mobile shopping, most consumers still prefer shopping in physical stores across the majority of retail categories. At the same time, online research, remote ordering, and hybrid fulfillment models are reshaping how merchants must think about customer experience, inventory management, and channel integration as consumers move fluidly between digital and in-store shopping journeys.
Mercator Advisory Group lists 5 counterintuitive implication for changing shipping patterns.
1) Most customers (17 out of 21 merchant verticals) still prefer to shop in-store. Merchants who over-commit to online and digital risk a self-fulfilling prophecy of expecting physical stores to fail.
2) Consumers are surprisingly fluid in their channel preference and usage. 31% of consumers indicate they’re more likely to shop in store following online research.
3) The largest change in consumer shopping is the advent of online research. But there’s no reason to think consumers dislike in-store shopping (#1 above), so price comparison might be the driving force behind online shopping.
4) As new tech-enabled shopping channels emerge, consumers don’t tend to drop any of the old channels. So merchants have to provide consistent customer support across all channels and across all levels of experience
5) Remote order and pick up is a good example of an organizational silo busting hybrid channel. It must be considered a strategic component of the physical store and e/m-commerce implementations, but its very complex so there might be a long lead time before it arrives en masse.
