Study: Most holiday shoppers check out this retailer
Close to nine in 10 consumers will take a look at one specific retailer before making a holiday gift purchase.
According to a survey of 3,000 U.S. consumers by marketing platform provider BloomReach, 87% of respondents will comparison shop at Amazon.com before buying a gift. This frequency of product searches is paying off for Amazon, as 73% of respondents said they will buy from Amazon and 71% will spend more than a quarter of their holiday budgets on Amazon.
In addition, more than 31% will spend more than half of their holiday budgets on Amazon. Even if consumers find exactly what they want with acceptable prices and shipping, 28% would still compare the product on Amazon, virtually the same percentage as the 29% stating they'd buy it right then.
BloomReach asked Amazon shoppers exactly why they continually choose the company over other retailers. Surprisingly, prices were not the top reason. Approximately 43% of respondents said the main reason was Amazon's ability to intuitively find or predict exactly what they want more quickly. Only 33% said that better prices were the main reason.
Furthermore, results show that many U.S. consumers appear to view Amazon's product-searching capabilities better than search engines – specifically Google. For example:
39% of respondents said Amazon has better product-searching capabilities; 8% said Google; 53% said it was equivalent.
46% of consumers won't use Google Shopping to look for gifts, and 29% don't know what it is.
68% of Google Shopping users said they found the gifts they wanted half the time or less, with 24% reporting they "never" found what they wanted.
Amazon also appears to be expanding its use cases to be more of its own retail search engine. About 40% of respondents named Amazon as the starting point when they knew what they wanted to get a particular person. However, when they did not know what to get someone, 35% still named Amazon as the starting point.
Another 23% said search engines, while 20% reported a preferred retailer's physical store and 14% named a preferred retailer's website. Only 6% said deal marketplaces like Groupon.
Finally, as consumers value Amazon's predictive experience as the top differentiator, they see other retailers' digital experience as frustrating.
The top consumer frustration about digital retailing was irrelevant search results on a retailer's site-search, followed closely by poor product descriptions.
61% will only try twice to search for a product on a retailer's site before giving up.
56% expect a retailer site to have relevant auto-complete search functionality.
51% will leave a retail site if they see three irrelevant search results after searching.