Individual characteristic and demographic changes among consumers have been occurring across multiple markets throughout the past couple of years. The bigger picture forecasts a future in which e-commerce is expected to grow at continuous rates.
Location has long played a role in a consumer’s decision to participate in e-commerce or shop online. When divided into two main categories, urban and rural, surveys conducted by Retail Dive found 4 percent of rural shoppers shop exclusively online compared to 7 percent of urban shoppers. When asked why they prefer to shop in stores, rural shoppers were found to value seeing, touching, feeling and trying out items at a margin of 9 percent greater than urban shoppers. In 2017, 55 percent of the total global population is expected to live in an urban setting, according to Ad Age. Urban population growth has been steadily increasing since 2007, when it first surpassed rural population.
Americans shop differently depending on where they live. For instance, although they have more physical stores nearby, shoppers in metropolitan areas spend more online annually ($853) than suburban shoppers ($768) or those in rural areas ($684). They also spend the most time shopping online out of the three groups. —BigCommerce, 2017
Mobile has continually been stealing market share from desktop or laptop computers. Despite this growth, the mobile experience still hasn’t been to par compared to traditional web browsing methods, and mobile hasn’t translated into as high of conversion rates. According to Smart Insights, mobile devices account for 42 percent of all sessions but only provides 21 percent of the market revenue for online shopping. Mobile e-commerce has been on the rise though,acquiring its own branding (m-commerce)and is expected to reach $284 billion in total revenue by 2020. At the current state of the market, consumers may not overwhelmingly prefer to use mobile devices to shop, but they’ve evolved to become powerful research tools for online shopping decisions.
Dirxion offers tools for businesses to capitalize on the shifting trends and growth in the e-commerce market via online catalog services. Dirxion online catalogs are extremely versatile and optimized with HTML5 to ensure cross-platform and multi-browser performance standards are met. Dirxion online catalogs can be integrated into existing e-commerce platforms and live directly on a company’s website to ensure a seamless, optimized shopping experience for customers.
