There was a report released recently which was an Online Consumer Report from RichRelevance. The report offered many important insights for online retailers. The period it concentrated on was up to the 2011 holiday shopping season. With a shopping session count of more than 200 million on major U.S. retail sites, showed online shopping behavior and browsing trends. Moreover, it even had some detailing as to how consumers make purchasing decisions.
The consumer navigation to a retail store was examined in the study, which was from social networks, search engines or bookmarks. The reporting period noted that for August 2011, over 4 million orders were placed which totaled up to $500 million.
To start with the organic search engine results, they still are the leaders for online merchants as it alone provides up to 18 percent of all traffic. With no surprise for the search engine leaderboard, Google topped with a share of 81 percent of the said share. To its extreme was AOL, with just 1.7 percent of organic traffic. Yahoo and Bing had only a considerable amount of share with 9.7 percent and 7.5 percent respectively. An interesting point to note here was that AOL traffic gets converted and orders accordingly are placed with a higher rate, averaging at $105.27 per order.
Social networks even had their share, but their conversion rate was low and the majors in this case, such as Facebook and Twitter accounted for less than 1 percent of traffic. However, for a noticeable increase, Facebook traffic to retail sites was up by 92 percent year-over-year for August. But the conversion rates were a mere 1.2 and 0.5 percent for Facebook and Twitter respectively. This rate was not same when the spending powers were detailed.
The report stated that those who landed on a site via Google’s organic search, were not spending as much as they were via the social networks. In the social networking list,Twitter lone was a topper in the list of big spenders across all traffic categories with an average order of $121.33.
RichRelevance CEO David Selinger said, “As retailers vie to get their share of an estimated $450 billion in holiday spending, there is a tremendous opportunity to respond to the different ways that people are shopping on their sites”. He continued saying that the success list leaders here would turn out to be the most effective wrapping the e-commerce experience for each and every shopper. This can be Google, Facebook or even a direct email link.
E-commerce spending are on a rise for the current year, which could make the retailers happy and be counted in for Happy Holiday Season. Talking about the comScore stats provided here, Q2 2011 U.S. retail e-commerce spending grew 14 percent over the year prior, which accounted for $37.5 billion. For a briefing, the year-over-year improvements were for the seventh consecutive quarter.
eMarketer even was all in for social commerce, mobile commerce, and daily deals sites, stating that the growth of the online retail space would continue to grow. They even predicted that that more than $100 billion would be generated annually via online retail by 2015.