Retailers Shut Facebook Storefonts Amid Apathy

Excerpted from  Bloomberg By Ashley Lutz - Feb 17, 2012 12:00 AM ET

Last April, Gamestop Corp. (GME) opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered.

Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney (JCP) Co. and Nordstrom (JWN) Inc. have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook Inc.’s (FB) social networking site.

Facebook, which this month filed for an initial public offering, has sought to be a top shopping destination for its 845 million members. The stores’ quick failure shows that the Menlo Park, California-based social network doesn’t drive commerce and casts doubt on its value for retailers, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts…Continue reading at Bloomberg

How Americans Use Their Phones to Assist With Purchasing Decisions

Image : DiverseImages

More than half of adult cell phone owners used their cell phones while they were in a store during the 2011 holiday season to seek help with purchasing decisions. During a 30 day period before and after Christmas:

  • 38% of cell owners used their phone to call a friend while they were in a store for advice about a purchase they were considering making
  • 24% of cell owners used their phone to look up reviews of a product online while they were in a store
  • 25% of adult cell owners used their phones to look up the price of a product online while they were in a store, to see if they could get a better price somewhere else

Taken together, just over half (52%) of all adult cell owners used their phone for at least one of these three reasons over the holiday shopping season and one third (33%) used their phone specifically for online information while inside a physical store—either product reviews or pricing information.

Detailed findings—online product reviews and calling friends for purchasing advice

There are a number of demographic patterns in these survey findings. Specifically:

  • Cell owners ages 18-49 are significantly more likely to use their phones for online product reviews than are cell owners ages 50 and older. Cell owners ages 65 and older are especially unlikely to do this—just 4% did so this holiday season.
  • Urban and suburban cell owners are roughly twice as likely as rural cell owners to have recently used their phone to look up online reviews of a product they found in a physical store.
  • Non-white cell owners are more likely than white cell owners to look up online product reviews, and those who have attended college are more likely to do so than those who have not.

Continue Reading the entire report at Pew Internet Research

Mobile Technology Leads to Better Customer Experience

Motorola Solutions Survey shows 67% of shoppers agree emerging in-store technologies heighten overall satisfaction.

The rising availability of shopping-assisted options across all shopping channels has raised customer service expectations for shoppers and retail associates. According to the survey, more than eight in 10 (83.3%) surveyed retail associates and managers believe that shoppers can easily find a better deal so customer service is more important than ever. From a shopper perspective, 33% of shopping trips ended with shoppers leaving before satisfying their intent to purchase, costing an average of $125 per trip. Of those lost opportunities, more than 73% did not complete their purchases with the original retailer.

While shopper activity and spend remains higher in-store than online, retailers need to continue to address the needs of the omni-channel shopper. Online purchases swelled by more than 18% compared to 2010 and 63% of surveyed shoppers with smartphones downloaded some type of shopping application.

Increasing online spend has created variances in satisfaction between offline and online experiences – almost 41% of shoppers were not satisfied with the ability to receive in-stock status in-store compared to 20% online. Approximately 27% of shoppers were not satisfied with the ease of finding correct prices in-store versus approximately 14% online; and 42% of shoppers were not satisfied with the check-out process in-store compared to 15% online. Online shoppers cited a much higher dissatisfaction rate (41% compared to 25%) for the return/exchange process, providing a significant advantage for in-store retailers…Continue reading at CSD