April 18, 2016: New research from Salsify – a content management firm – attempts to quantify the relative importance of price, product descriptions, and reviews in a shopper’s decision to buy.
The survey – conducted via SurveyMonkey in February 2016, asked more than a thousand online shoppers about the most important factors impacting their purchasing decisions.
Here’s what these shoppers said:
1. Product images and descriptions rule. According to the study, “88 percent of consumers demand accurate, rich, and complete product content” before hitting the buy button. “Product content” includes images, with “66 percent of respondents report(ing) that they require at least three product images” before making a purchase. This finding has important implications for e-tailers, many of whom have stocked their websites with product descriptions and stock photos that are indistinguishable from those provided by the OEM. This practice is bad from an SEO perspective and likely to disappoint shoppers hungry for detailed product information. E-tailers, therefore, should evaluate whether they’ve invested enough in rich product descriptions to meet the needs of information-hungry shoppers.
2. Reviews count a lot. 82 percent of shoppers polled by Salsify “want to see a minimum of three product reviews when they are considering a purchase.” Consumers want assurance that the products they are about to buy have been well received in the market, and they want to sample a variety of opinions from different sources before making a purchase. Younger people, it seems, are especially demanding when it comes to product reviews. Salsify’s survey results reported that “millennials are 50 percent more likely to rank ratings and reviews as the number one most important factor when deciding which site to buy from.”
3. Price isn’t always a deal-maker or deal-breaker. Consumers will always be price-sensitive, especially for commodity products in a competitive market. But Salsify found that price was ranked #3 – after detailed product descriptions and ratings – in the consumer purchasing decision.
Salsify is a company whose services are concerned with supplying e-tailers with tools to manage the content on their sites, so it’s not a big surprise to see them touting content as a critical factor in the buying cycle.
But there’s no question that today’s shoppers are demanding information – lots of it – before hitting the “buy” button, and those e-tailers who can best satisfy these needs will profit, with those who can’t risk being overlooked, especially because, according to Salsify, “94 percent of would-be buyers will abandon an ecommerce site or just give up altogether if product content is deficient and they are unable to find the information they need.”
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