How do shoppers behave online? An observational study of online grocery shopping

Abstract

The pace of online shopping revenue growth means it is important for retailers and manufacturers to understand how consumers behave online compared with their behaviour in brick and mortar stores. We conducted a study in which the detailed behaviour of 40 shoppers was screen recorded while they each undertook an online shopping 'trip'. The shopping trip comprised purchasing a basket of 12 commonly bought grocery categories at one of two major retailers. The shoppers were all inexperienced in online grocery shopping. Results show that online grocery shopping is fast, even for these consumers who were new to it -half of the online shoppers spent less than 10 seconds purchasing from a category. This result is very similar to that of past studies in physical stores. Indeed, half of all the 12 item-shopping trips took less than 10 minutes. Also, most purchases were made from the first category page displayed in the retailer's online store. Shoppers also consistently used the default display options chosen by the retailers but used a combination of navigational tools to find their products. We conclude that online shoppers do not behave differently from those offline in terms of time spent or effort expended. Online shopping, in the grocery context at least, seems to primarily reflect a desire for time efficiency on the part of the shopper. In that regard, online shopping seems very similar to in-store shopping. The study begins the job of documenting shopper behaviour into this new channel and provides practical knowledge for retailers and manufacturers.

An exploratory investigation of shopper behaviour in an immersive virtual reality store

“…As similarities and differences between VSS and actual shopper behaviour have been quite well established for single category testing in desktop VSS shopping, we report a differentiated replication that checks some key results from the VSS literature, but also examines a broader set of in‐store behaviours within an immersive VSS environment. This approach is similar to that of Anesbury, Nenycz‐Thiel, Dawes, and Kennedy (), who documented online shopper behaviour in an exploratory manner, with benchmarks for validation drawn from prior work in the physical retailing literature. The results of the present study will indicate whether immersive VSS experiments lead to authentic shopper behaviour usable by market researchers and in consumer behaviour experiments.…”

Discussion on the Mechanism of Irrational Online Shopping Behavior—Based on the Perspective of Mental Accounting Theory

“…One of the most important benefits of online shopping is its convenience [49]. For example, the convenience of product searching, providing different payment Open Journal of Social Sciences methods and options for flexible delivery [50] [51], avoiding traffic to physical stores and competing with other shoppers [52]. According to mental accounting theory, greater convenience means the consumption of mental and physical energy in getting the product will be reduced, thus saving time and effort to improve the effectiveness of the transaction utility [53].…”

Searching for information and making purchase decisions in b2b online stores. The case of the technical articles wholesale

“…Analysis of the shopping cart can provide a valuable information about the needs and behavior of on-line and offline consumers. We can find many researches in the area of: what (and when) is being purchased [15] [19], shopping basket size and value analysis [16], effect of sales promotions on shopping basket [17][18], the cart filling time [20], the influence of smart shopping card on shopping behavior [21], or determinants of consumers' online shopping cart abandonment [22][23] [24].…”

“…Anesbury, Nenycz-Thiel, Dawes and Kennedy [20] examined in details behavior of 40 shoppers by recording (screen recording) online shopping trip of new, inexperienced grocery customers. They concluded that shopping process is quite fast.…”

“…In the future studies we want to obtain interplay between quantitative and qualitative methods so we intend to examine small groups of b2b platform users using in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus groups to measure customers' engagement, and know better client's unique organizational culture. The interesting material for deeper analysis could be obtained also by recording (screen recording) the on-line shopping process [20]. The authors examined single b2b platform that may limit the findings generalizability so in the future research other b2b platforms should be explored to validate the results [2].…”