Stat Watch: Into the Digital Cart

You’d think that e-commerce professionals would be resting on their digital laurels with yearafter- year of impressive results, but they’re not. Web retailers are pushing the virtual envelope every chance they get, becoming significant contributors to the global and local economies.

The projected e-commerce spending in the United States this year alone, according to Forrester Research, is a jaw-dropping $262 billion, a 13.4 percent increase over 2012. How did it get there? The best in e-commerce technology, of course, from personalization and retargeting to more nimble and smarter shopping carts.

Website Magazine’s editorial staff aggregates and curates interesting research and data like what you’ll find in this month’s STAT WATCH column nearly every day on the Web, publishing the information Internet professionals need to create strategies and executive campaigns and technology initiatives more efficiently.

64% of e-commerce shopping carts that were abandoned in Q3 2012 (Source: Monetate). 

81% of moms say they would buy and engage more if rewarded with loyalty points on top of the $2.4 trillion of spending they already influence every year as the primary decision-makers of household purchases (Source: PunchTab’s 2013 “Scoring Points With Mom” report).

47% of companies say that the biggest barrier to website personalization is IT roadblocks, with legacy technology (46 percent) falling closely behind, according to Monetate and Econsultancy’s “The Realities of Online Personalization” research.

6% of smartphone users conducted their most recent mobile retail search in a brick-and-mortar store, indicating that even though showrooming is a growing concern, it may be overhyped. The ongoing xAd/Telmetrics “U.S. Mobile Path-to-Purchase” study conducted by Nielsen also reported that 77 percent of smartphone retail shoppers ultimately made their purchases in-store versus going online to find a cheaper price.

90% of mobile searches lead to action (e.g. store visit or phone call), with more than half leading to purchases (Source: Vistaprint UK infographic).

$53 is the average price of items bought on U.S. Web retail sites using iPads, compared to $24 on smartphones and $22 on PCs/laptops, according to RichRelevance’s “2012 Q1 Shopping Insights Mobile Study.”

40% of online shoppers abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load (Source: KISSmetrics, 2012).