5 Types of Ecommerce Shopper

BY FABSITE

If you run an ecommerce store, understanding your visitors, and adjusting your marketing techniques can help you convert them into sales.

Here we discuss 5 types of ecommerce shopper as well as how you can target them.

Researchers

Many of the visitors to an ecommerce website will be looking for more information regarding the different products available to them, finding more details about the product specifications to ensure they match their requirements, and validating their decision before making a purchase. For products such as electronics, researchers are a common source of traffic to an ecommerce store with almost half of all purchasers using search engines before committing to a product.

For high-budget items, the majority of this traffic will end up making a purchase directly from the brands official store. Ensuring that your website builds trust whilst the researchers are on your website as well as highlighting any special deals or promotions can help you capture a portion of this audience.

Comparison Shoppers

Comparison shoppers like to check multiple sites for the best products and prices before making a purchase. These shoppers are more likely to purchase non-branded items.

If the products on your website aren’t branded, you should ensure you include as much information as possible, everything from product sizes to compositions, safety ratings, country of manufacture, and a general description of the overall product.

If your product is branded, ensure your product page mentions the brand across optimisation and content to make sure you’re being found in search results. If possible, carry out your own comparisons regularly to make sure your prices (and delivery costs) are competitive.

You can also use customer reviews on your product pages to help potential customers decide whether your product is right for them.

Social Shoppers

Social media is playing a growing part in the success of many brand’s online marketing campaigns. With the growing number of social influencers, brands can receive an almost instant cult following if their products are mentioned by the right people. Beauty influencers like Brad Mondo, NikkieTutorials, Bailey Sarian, Naomi Jon, and James Welsh have catapulted hair and cosmetic brands such as The Ordinary and Huda Beauty into the limelight. Brands often send them free samples of their products in the hopes of getting them featured in a video.

Social shoppers not only rely on influencers to find new products, many use platforms such as Facebook and Pinterest as search engines, entering the products they are interested in into the search bar to find results they may never have discovered using traditional search. Ecommerce stores can ensure they appear in these results by adding regular product updates on their business pages, tagging in the products so that people can easily locate and purchase them.

If you want to give your social presence a boost, you can even use paid ads to appear in search results and feeds for people that match your target demographics.

Cross Affinity Shoppers

When shopping online, many people tend to search for more than one product at a time. Known as affinity audiences, customers tend to have shopping interests and habits that closely relate to each other which is a valuable tool for many ecommerce website looking to cross-sell their products.

Tools such as Google Ads Audiences and Facebook Audience Insights can help you understand where these crossovers occur so that you can target them more effectively in your online marketing campaigns.

Examples of crossovers in affinity audiences are:

People moving house are also interested in discount & outlet stores
People buying arts & crafts supplies are also interested in printers
People buying gift baskets are also interested in children’s clothes & toys
People buying pet supplies are also interested in household cleaning supplies
People interested in travelling are also interested in fashion

Amazon Loyalists

Similar to the researchers, Amazon loyalists will often use search engines to find the best products for their requirements before returning to Amazon to search for those products and make the purchase. 77% of Amazon loyalists use search engines to research products and tend to search around 12 times before purchasing a product.

Many people remain loyal to Amazon due to Prime’s free and next-day delivery, even when the prices are higher. If you offer free or next day delivery for your products, make sure you’re highlighting this across all of your pages.

If you’re interested in creating a new eCommerce store or need help turning visitors into sales, contact us today on 0333 320 8099. We provide low-cost, pay monthly web design and online marketing services to help your business succeed.