Study: No fast sale with online shoppers

Retailers like to promote and capture impulse purchases, but need to think longer-term for e-commerce.



According to the latest E-commerce Quarterly Report from marketing platform provider Monetate (covering the first quarter of 2016), only 42% of all online purchases happen in the first 60 minutes following a shopper’s first visit to a website. An additional 9% of all online purchases happen in the six hours immediately following those first 60 minutes. Another 16% happen roughly one day after a shopper first visited a site, 28% happen between 26 and 41 hours after a first site visit, and. 5% of all purchases happen nearly two days after a shopper first visited a site.



The study also finds that despite the proliferation of consumer mobile devices, the desktop is still completely dominant in e-commerce. Ninety percent of all e-commerce consumers used a desktop to begin shopping online, and 91% completed their purchase on a desktop.



Desktops also accounted for 75% of all e-commerce-related page views, although they were especially high during the work hours of 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. Mobile and tablet share of e-commerce-related page views peaked during commuting hours, early mornings and late nights at about 40-45%. Mobile phones always have a larger share than tablets.



Overall online shopper engagement peaks between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., suggesting that a lot of e-commerce activity happens during work hours. U.S. e-commerce conversion rate for the quarter was 3.02%, on track with the global 3.01% conversion rate.



Looking at site visits by platform, the study found that Windows is by far the most popular platform for consumers to conduct e-commerce activity (40%), followed by iOS (33%). Android (15%) and Mac (11%) are the only other platforms with significant share. Chrome OS, Linux and Windows Phone combine to support the remaining 1% of consumer e-commerce activity.