A Changing In Holiday Shopping Experience
If you are like me, your holiday shopping experience has completely changed over the years. During the holidays now, I start shopping in late November and continue throughout December. I prefer staying away from the crowds of Black Friday, and end up shopping online for most my gifts. This was not always the case. In the past, I would stand in lines and race through stores to get the exact gifts I needed. check links . website headers . Naturally, I thought to myself “are other shoppers having the same experience as me?”
The Internet has a wealth of data that can provide insight into consumer behavior, so my team decided to analyze the data to see if other shoppers had the same holiday shopping experience as I did. Are other consumers shopping the same way? Has the era of traditional holiday shopping ended?
While cooking the big meal, I used my smartphone to research products, read reviews, compare deals, and to look up a recipe for green bean casserole. Mobile shopping has steadily grown each holiday season, so it is no surprise to me that, across the e-commerce landscape, mobile shopping was 52.1% of online traffic on Thanksgiving Day.
When buying a product, I look at the number of reviews (if a product does not have reviews, I don’t consider it). Research has actually found that 28% of product page visitors interacted with reviews. After that, I consider the product’s average rating, then the content of the reviews. Studies have also found that most consumers follow this same approach. But it’s not just the presence of reviews that counts; volume also is important. In one study, we saw an average 27.8% increase in orders when review volume went from one review to 15 reviews, and product rating from 3.5-4.5 stars. Benchmarks from these studies show that adding just one review to a product with no reviews can increase sales by 10%, and going from no reviews to 50 can increase sales by 30%.
After dinner, I spent the rest of my evening refining my shopping list by choosing specific models & comparing prices. This appears to be a common behavior this season. We found that traffic on Thanksgiving increased 29% compared to 2013, (an increase of 55%). Shopper traffic peaked between 4 – 11 PM.
