quick take: Understanding online consumer behavior

Understanding the typical behavior of online consumers is a good place to start!

Here are some useful facts:

• 80% of the most frequent online consumers use marketplaces and price comparison engines (like Pricerunner or Google Shopping) to compare offers.
• The vast majority of online consumers visit a product page three or more times before making a purchase.
• Approximately 50% of the online consumers have failed to complete a purchase online because there were too many choices.

So, the above tells us that consumers:

• almost always compare prices
• that buying online is more a process rather than an impulsive action
• present consumers with too many options might be counterproductive

For these reasons, having the opportunity to interact with consumers during the buying window is essential to maximize profitability.

The buying window has traditionally been illusive and hard to pinpoint for OEMs but that is no longer the case since OEM-retargeting offers exactly that. By investing a small portion of their marketing budget in OEM-retargeting, OEMs gain the opportunity to educate, influence and finally; convert consumers when it’s most important to do so.