What Accounts For Online Shopping’s Meteoric Growth?
Do you know someone who still has never made a purchase over the internet? If you do, their numbers are steadily dwindling – it’s now estimated that more than 60% of all American shoppers have made at least one online purchase in their lifetime. You have, haven’t you?
According to recent U.S. Census Bureau data, online consumer shopping continues its relentless growth, posting a 14% increase in the first quarter of 2010 over the same quarter in 2009. More and more internet-savvy consumers flood the online marketplace every year. Looking at another related statistic, e-commerce sales – today accounting for only 4% ($37.8 billion) of the total adjusted retail sales here in the U.S. – also continue to increase proportionately. Although the typical “brick and mortar” establishments continue their retail dominance, as you can see, the sky is truly the limit for e-commerce’s growth potential.
What’s behind that impressive growth rate? If you haven’t made an online purchase yourself yet, many online shoppers claim these main benefits:
- It’s easier to place an order online than to drive to the store
- Shoppers can choose between a wider variety of products that can only be shown online
- Since it’s cheaper to run a virtual store than it is a small shop in a strip center, prices can be lower
- You can frequently save money on sales taxes by buying from out-of-state companies
- Making price or product comparisons doesn’t get any easier
- Your purchases are made in the pressure-free comfort of your own home
The smart “big box” retailers and other merchants of today fully understand that they need to make it as easy as possible for all of their customers to reach them. By offering a variety of sales channels (e.g., the traditional strip mall storefront, a “virtual” online store presence, a 1-800 phone order system, etc.), they’re making it easier to connect with their clientele and continue to try to grow their market shares. Sometimes the approaches blur – purchasing something online and then going to a local store to pick it up – when designing new solutions. The bottom line is that it’s the relationship with their customers that matters the most to business owners, and that offering an online sales option only makes it that much easier to strengthen that relationship.
Increasingly, the necessity of providing a virtual storefront to their customers is becoming more apparent to even small business owners. For example, a local roofer may have only a few commercial accounts and several homebuilders as clients. Since more people are actively shopping for products and services online every day, how much business might be lost by that roofer by not having an online “stake in the ground” that they can also reference? What happens when the free Yellow Pages directories are no longer printed and are only made available online? Even small businesses are finding it makes sense to expand their business presence to the web.
Although the internet has forever changed the way business is conducted, one should remember that it really is nothing more than an additional – yet extremely powerful – transactional “channel” that a successful business offers one’s customers. In the end, it’s still the nurturing of the relationship between the business and his/her customers that matters the most. The internet is just one more tool that businesses can use to do precisely that.
Author Pieter Grundolf writes extensively about strategic sales and marketing trends, including the best shopping sites online and other consumer information. Follow Pieter’s soon-to-be-released new article series on just what makes the best shopping sites the best.
So watch out even if you’re not trading at the time. I will go into this more deeply soon.
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