Gas Prices and Online Shopping
Here’s an article for the business owner. A couple weeks ago, The New York Times posted this article, To Save Gas, Shoppers Stay Home and Click. It features a number of huge companies and has a great chart comparing Gap’s first quarter sales in stores and online.
A great example of outside influences of consumer behavior - the poor economy, the exorbitant price of gas. Consumers are shopping much more online this year rather than going to the gas pump then hitting the mall. What does that mean for businesses, large and small? The online customer experience is now more important than ever - from the ease of finding your website, to being able to see your products and services, to reading reviews of those products and services written by real people, to being able to swiftly make a purchase, or to receiving more information from you. Online customers need the same service treatment that they receive in-store. Your website has to exude your business - I like Anthropologie’s site, for example. Gives you a sense of their brick-and-mortar store, and is extremely simple; I can make a purchase in only four clicks from their homepage.
But back to the article - gas prices and online shoppers are causing a lot of big companies to take notice. Target, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and half a dozen other huge companies are offering limited-time free shipping online; both embracing the surge of online buyers and attempting to cushion the blow that the in-store sales have received.
These online customers aren’t just the computer-savvy either.
“I’m a computer illiterate person,” said one of the people interviewed in the article. “But I’m becoming much more literate as a result of gas prices.” Virtually everyone industry’s customers are opting to stay at home, research your product online, and make purchases from home. These customers need to be able to find you quickly and easily, or they’ll simply look elsewhere online for the product or service. The hard times of the economy and the high gas prices coupled with the ease of the internet and shopping online are making this environment extremely competitive.
Online sales are expected to surpass $200 billion this year, the article states, and all industries are taking note.
“To encourage the trend, retailers are investing in online operations and experimenting with new marketing techniques. Even retailers that are scaling back in their physical stores are expanding or enhancing online operations, which are by and large the fastest growing parts of their company. The shopping Web sites themselves are becoming speedier, easier to navigate and filled with more products.”
I’m really looking forward to this year because of all of this. More and more, people are beginning to see how important their business’s online image is, and as a web-ophile, that makes me smile. Read the article and tell me what you think!
August 6th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
That just shows the big stores are learning what the small ones know - a great website and social media out-produce our stores. Challenge is improving our site and keeping it fresh!