Report assesses how consumers feel about online shopping

Saturday, July 5, 2014 - 09:32 by Graham Miller

The latest report from JDA has looked at the state of e-commerce in 2014, finding out what makes consumers loyal to certain sites which offer safe shopping online, as well as highlighting the issues and annoyances that can convince shoppers to jump ship and switch to a rival outlet.

The Guardian reports that the survey revealed that a fifth of Brits have experienced problems with home delivery services after purchasing a product online, while almost two thirds of respondents said that they would happily ditch a retailer they had used in the past, if they experienced any kind of dissatisfaction during the online shopping process.

Fifty seven per cent said that they wanted to see retailers do more to combine the in-store and online experience, closing the gap between their bricks and mortar outlets and the websites they have built to help sell to a web-based audience.

Nearly half of those questioned said that they had harnessed a click & collect service in the last year, but 33 per cent of this group said that they had not been very impressed with the in-store experience when going to pick up their online order.

The problem is that safe shopping online can be quick and convenient, but when consumers then have to head to a real world outlet and encounter a very different style of retail, the distinctions can be especially jarring.

Consumers voiced frustrations over the amount of time it took for staff to look up items or retrieve orders when harnessing click & collect. This could be a bit of a spanner in the works for growth in this multichannel approach to retail if more is not done to shape up these services and stop customers from encountering unhelpful road blocks.