E-commerce drives stock prices and tantalizes the press. But so far, consumers still tend to buy offline, not online, and they seem to prefer to make large purchases in the physical world.
According to the Harris Interactive ecommercePulse study, almost 30 percent of those surveyed said they had made purchases offline during April, while only 22.6 percent made online purchases.
Of those who did make purchases, they clearly spent more offline. A little more than 10 percent spent between $101 and $499 in the offline world, while only 6.4 percent said they'd spent that much online.
For the big spenders, the difference was sharper. Some six percent of those surveyed said they had spent more than $500 in the physical world, but only 3.4 percent said they had spent that much money online.
The survey also suggests that advertisers in particular may need to rethink how they measure the effectiveness of Web advertising. While click-through rates have dominated thinking about online ad effectiveness, consumers may well be influenced to make purchases offline, without clicking through.
Hit rates
Harris Interactive also measured how many people purchased products from companies after visiting their Web sites, either online or offline. Only three categories turned more than 20 percent of shoppers into buyers: clothing, music/video and books.
Of these, clothing had the highest success rate, as 29 percent of those who shopped actually purchased (many of the purchases were made in physical stores). Music/video sites had a 22.5 percent hit rate, and books checked in at nearly 22 percent.
Perhaps because many Web users already have computers, the computer hardware category had one of the lowest hit rates. Some 13 percent of those who shopped online actually purchased a computer. That still scores higher than the fitness category, which had a 12.5 percent hit rate, and the insurance category, which had a mere 8.8 percent hit rate.
Some other numbers of note: While auction sites had a fairly high number of shoppers, with 27 percent of respondents, it had a low conversion rate, just below 14 percent. Travel sites draw more shoppers than any other type, with more than 44 percent of respondents saying they had shopped online. But only 7.4 percent actually made purchases, a hit rate of 16.9 percent.
Another number to note: Some 90 percent of the online population used the Internet to obtain product information.
