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What Online Consumers Want: A Personalized Experience

Consumers both want and expect online merchants to provide personalized experiences and product recommendations based on shopping behavior, according to a MyBuys/e-tailing group survey of 1,345 online consumers - MarketingCharts writes.

Among the highlights of the findings:

• Three out of four consumers are willing to provide some meaningful amount of personal information in exchange for a more personalized, relevant shopping experience.
• 77 percent say they have made additional purchases when they have encountered personalized product recommendations online - more than half say they usually peruse those recommendations when offered (view chart).
• More than one-third of consumers (36 percent) indicate that they award more loyalty to merchants who meet demand for true personalization in the shopping experience.
• Just 2 percent report feeling that products suggested to them online are tailored for them based on their individual purchases and behaviors.

“Our research shows that consumers value the convenience, time savings and ease they get from a more relevant interaction with a merchant,” said Lauren Freedman, president, the e-tailing group.

However, most merchants have not yet made the technology investments necessary to create effective personalized product recommendations, MyBuys noted.

From one-on-one interviews with 24 merchants:

• Personalization is only an upcoming initiative for 41 percent of merchants.
• More than one-third of merchants cite lack of resources as a challenge to making personalization a higher priority - see top 5 challenges.
• 79 percent of merchants who do attempt to personalize the online experience still rely on manual, hard-coded methods for providing additional product recommendations to online shoppers.