Survey Finds Holiday Shoppers Prefer In-Store Experience to Online Shopping This Season

Most American consumers now say they prefer to shop in a physical store for holiday purchases, according to a new survey from the Campaign Management & Analytics division of SDL, a provider of technology that enables retailers to combine, analyze and understand consumer behavior across purchase channels.

Online shopping preference trailed in-store experiences by less than a two-percentage point margin in this survey, but the data is noteworthy because online shopping has appeared to outpace in-store shopping more recently.

According to this survey, consumers still like an in-store experience to interact physically with a product, which may be tipping consumers toward stores and malls this holiday season.

Regardless of where they are shopping, a vast majority of holiday shoppers – more than 80 percent of this year’s respondents – say they prefer to shop on personal time, further challenging reports that consumers mostly shop online during work hours and decrease productivity during the holiday season.

“With the data from those surveyed showing a close margin between in-store and online preferences, we believe this holiday season will be made up of customer experiences from multiple channels,” said Bob Hale, CEO of SDL Campaign Management & Analytics division. “The new take-away message for retailers during this season: Understanding and engaging customers based on their preferred use of each channel creates a customer experience consumers will value during the holidays and year round.”

Other highlights from the SDL survey supporting the importance of multiple channels during the holiday shopping season:

• * More than 75 percent of respondents say the ability to evaluate a product in person will influence their decision to purchase.
• * Nearly 43 percent of respondents will use a physical store as a resource to learn more about products they want to buy.
• * When making the decision to shop online, nearly 60 percent of respondents do it to avoid holiday crowds in stores.
• * More than 40 percent of survey respondents said that product quality for the price or value positively influences their shopping experience.

About SDL
SDL enables global businesses to engage with their customers in the language, the media and at the moment they choose. The SDL Campaign Management & Analytics division combines data captured through customer interactions across several media and purchase channels, including email, direct mail, online, digital, and social. With the Campaign Management & Analytics technology, global retail marketers can interact with this data in a free form or unstructured way to develop a single-view of their customers and develop new insights about how to engage and promote relevant action to these customers.

SDL has more than 1,500 enterprise customers, 400 partners and a global infrastructure of 70 offices in 38 countries. For more information, visit www.sdl.com.

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This release was published on openPR.