If you think it has been hard for Jacksonville’s small, local retailers to compete with the big chains, thanks to mobile marketing, the picture has become bleaker. And in some cases, m-commerce is presenting a problem for the big retailers, too.
Internet Retailer magazine ran a series of articles that details how consumers are now going to brick and mortar stores to view products and compare prices, but are eventually making their purchases online with their smartphones.
Actually 29% of consumers who use smartphones for product research while in a retail store buy online, according to data research from ClickIQ.
Not only does this create a big disadvantage for small retailers, but the large retailers are also taking a major hit. For example, the ClickIQ study showed the most frequently used retail store customers visited for product research was Best Buy at 36%. They were able to retain 35% of the researchers who ended up buying at the store with another 14% who bought at BestBuy.com.
But it starts to drop from there, with Wal-Mart experiencing 30% researchers with 26% purchasing at the store and 10% buying at Walmart.com. Target was third with 29% researchers, 29% in-store purchasers and 8% buying at Target.com.
Research data revealed that the reasons customers purchased online was mainly due to price at 67%, followed by availability of product at 14%, product features at 8%, and free shipping at 7%.
ClickIQ also identified profiles of consumers using smartphones. The research found…
- 51% of mobile comparison shoppers who research in-store and buy online are between ages of 18 – 39 and 55% are male;
- 26% between ages of 30 – 39 and 25% between the ages of 18 – 29 have recently used a mobile device to research a product while in a store;
- The numbers drop with age for those researching in a store with 12% between ages of 40 – 49; 6% between ages of 50 – 59; and 2% over the age of 60.
One major retailer trying to break this trend is Walgreens. According to Internet Retailer, Walgreens is using mobile/social shopping service technology such as foursquare and Facebook Places to greet customers on their smartphones as they walk into the store. The Walgreens apps offer customers onscreen product recommendations, promotions and special price points available at that specific location.
But there are other clouds looming online that will be an additional threat to local retail businesses. That’s the online giants Amazon.com and eBay.
Of the 97 million U.S. adults who owned a smartphone running Apple iOS, an Android or a BlackBerry operating system, 45.4% visited Amazon.com’s m-commerce site or used the e-retailers’apps in March, according to the Mobile Metrix 2.0 report from the web and mobile measurement firm comScore Inc.
eBay Inc. followed with 28% of smartphone users visiting the m-commerce site or using eBay’s apps.
For the top 15 Internet destinations measured by comScore, 81.5% of visitors’ time was spent on apps while 18.5% was spent on sites.
According to comScore, the top 15 mobile destinationsare (in order of number of unique visitors)...
Google, Inc.
Facebook
Yahoo sites
Amazon.com
Wikimedia Foundation sites
Apple, Inc.
Cooliris
AOL Inc.
eBay Inc.
Zynga
Twitter
Rovio (Angry Birds)
The Weather Channel
Microsoft sites
ESPN
For more information, go to the April and June issues of Internet Retailer magazine and look for the articles authored by bill@verticalwebmedia.com.
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