Consumers are Harnessing Tech to Return to Stores — Good News or Bad News First?

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It turns out that showrooming by smartphone-toting consumers isn’t quite the death knell for brick-and-mortar stores that the popular narrative made it out to be.

Sure, shoppers are still getting a feel — quite literally — for some products in a traditional store and then running off to buy them online from a competitor. Amazon has made a science of the trend with its price comparison apps. But, recent surveys show that it’s even more common for shoppers to browse online before heading down to a traditional brick-and-mortar emporium to actually buy what they want.

In fact, the practice is common enough that it’s got its own trendy name: “webrooming;” and 60 percent of the shoppers recently surveyed by Nielsen said they do it. That compared to only 51 percent who said they check out products in a store before ultimately purchasing them online.

The Nielsen study, which  polled 30,000 consumers in 60 countries, supports a similar conclusion by Accenture, which found that 73 percent of shoppers engaged in showrooming while 88 percent used webrooming as a shopping strategy. That followed a Merchant Warehouse report and infographic that broke down showrooming and webrooming by age and found that webrooming is more popular than showrooming for all age groups.

And while beleaguered brick-and-mortar retailers can take some comfort in the trend, they might want to hold off before celebrating too lustily. The truth is that webrooming is just one more indication of how frictionless it’s become for shoppers to buy whatever they want, wherever they want to and from whomever they choose.

“What it really comes down to, is you’re not going to decide, as a retailer, where your client is going to meet you, where your client is going to purchase from you,” says Carl Boutet, of Canadian retail consortium Mega Group. “The consumer has all the power.”

See, all the talk about showrooming and webrooming is interesting and important to retailers, but the real story here is about technology — in particular the evolution of mobile technology and the explosion of smartphone adoption.

Just as the Internet democratized information and content-creation years ago, consumers’ ability to carry the Internet around in their pockets has shifted the balance of power in shopping.

“It comes down to a story that I’ve talked about many times, and that is the rise of mobile and how that’s impacting brands,” says Jeremy Hull, of digital marketing agency iProspect. “That wasn’t something that brands got together and put together a plan and launched this device and built it into their infrastructure and had a plan about how consumers would move through it.”

No, consumers are running the show now and that’s what takes some of the joy out of the webrooming trend for any particular retailer. Consider a typical retailer with both an online and brick-and-mortar presence. Sure, webrooming means shoppers are buying products in physical stores, but it doesn’t mean they’re buying them in your physical stores.

“I think it could be dangerous,” Hull says of webrooming, “because what’s going to happen is, they may find the product they love on your site. But if it’s available elsewhere, in a physical place that is more convenient and faster than yours, because you couldn’t compete on those factors, you just lost that sale.”

All of which leaves retailers in a pretty tough spot. Hull suggests that first off, they make sure they are responding to the way their customers think by resisting the temptation to look at in-store and online shopping as distinct parts of their businesses.

“Consumers don’t see channels,” Hull says. “They interact seamlessly with your brand, across multiple different places. We like to put them in buckets: The mobile user does this. Someone on social media does this. But it’s the same person moving throughout those various touchpoints.”

And interestingly, the answer for retailers might be to fight technology with technology — or at least to deploy technology in a way that blends mobile, desktop and in-store shopping into one experience. In particular, retailers should:

Focus on search-engine optimization practices and Web and mobile site technologies that ensure that the big search engines find the products on their sites that consumers are looking for.Improve the training of salespeople and arm them with digital resources that can help them better help customers find the information and products they want.

Create inventory and ordering systems that eliminate the lines between the online and in-store experience by offering in-store pickup of items ordered online and home delivery of items ordered in the store.

Reduce the frustration of shopping on mobile devices while creating cross-device connections so customers don’t feel like strangers every time they use a different device to approach a store’s online site. In fact, BloomReach data shows that consumers who use multiple devices are among a retailer’s most loyal customers.

Of course many retailers have been scrambling to keep up with their rapidly-evolving customers. Some already have created systems that allow them to offer the option of ordering online and picking up in the store, or ordering in the store and having it delivered to a customer’s home. Some are using the same sort of big data insights in stores that they use online to determine a customer’s preferences and to offer relevant promotions. And there are those who see Apple’s new mobile wallet as the latest brick-and-mortar savior.

Time will tell whether those retailers’ embrace of technology will reverse a trend that has seen the number of shoppers visiting stores drop consistently for months. And of course, there is the matter of the next shopping trend with the next buzzy label. You know it’s coming.

The only question now: Can brick-and-mortar stores remain nimble enough to survive their customers’ ever-changing lifestyles and shopping strategies?

Mike Cassidy is a storyteller at BloomReach. He brings a journalist’s eye to stories on Big Data, e-commerce, and tech culture.

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