Shoppers’ Web Savvy Prompting Online Retailers to Improve

With 53 percent of online shoppers early technology adopters - despite constituting just 36 percent of the North American population - retailers are feeling compelled to provide a consistently positive, more sophisticated shopping experience, according to the tenth annual Shop.org study conducted by Forrester Research (via MarketingCharts).

Among the top priorities reported by the 150 retailers surveyed for the second part of “The State of Retailing Online 2007” are fixing website design and performance issues, improving the efficiency of online marketing, and enhancing cross-channel integration.

The following are some key findings from the study:

• Fixing product detail pages will top retailers’ website to-do lists for the next 12 months: 88 percent of retailers plan to focus on improving content presented on product detail pages, with 80 percent adding alternative images, 72 percent incorporating lifestyle photography, and 63 percent integrating customer ratings and reviews.
• Retailers are also focusing on their homepages, integrating top sellers and “what’s new” sections, and making their Web sites more sophisticated, with dropdown menus and rollover lists in navigational areas.
• To differentiate themselves from competitors, online retailers are also making customer service a priority, with 33 percent of companies planning to invest more in live chat and 53 percent planning to enhance their guest checkout process within the next year.

MarketingCharts has more findings - on where marketing dollars go and on aligning online and offline channels - here.