Compete: 94% Do Online Research Pre-Purchase

A week or so ago Compete released some data showing how consumers use multiple sources of information prior to making a purchase and how those sources may differ by category. One interesting stat from the survey data that jumped out at me was the following:

[O]nly 6% of consumers surveyed as part of the Online Shopper Intelligence study indicated that they conducted no research prior to their last online purchase.

In other words, 94% did online research before making an online purchase.

While the context here is online purchase behavior, we can reasonably assume that this behavior is equally applicable to the far more common practice of buying offline. Most purchase behavior occurs offline (e-commerce is less than 4% of US retail) and these online buyers are not going to behave differently when they buy in physical stores.

Prior studies by comScore, BIGResearch, Yahoo! and others have found 80% to more than 90% of consumers buying in-store have consulted the Internet for information prior to purchase: ROBO.

Here’s another interesting piece of data from the Compete survey, showing the continuing popularity of coupon sites.

Source: Compete, Inc. 2/10.

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