Ecommerce | Ecommerce News

Bridging the Gap - Online Research to Offline Purchases

One thing that many people don’t know about big ticket items is that before people make a purchase most do a big chunk of their research online; however, with these bigger items 92% of consumers end up purchasing the product in-store through local retailers. With these items people often like to look and see what they are buying before making such a large purchase, and because of this, ecommerce has stagnated. Forrester’s data has shown that ecommerce is only expected to grow on average a little less than 1%/year from 6% in 2006 to 11% in 2012, whereas cross-channel sales will increase by about 3.5% a year from 16% in 2006 to 38% in 2012 (over twice that of ecommerce sales).

With so much expected growth one would expect that there would be a lot of competition vying for a peace of those profits. While there has been an increase in the number of local search engines, many have neglected to provide consumers with the information that they really want while they search online. Most are looking for four pieces of information before they buy: what is this product (description/SPECS)? who sells what I’m looking for? where can I find it cheapest? is it in stock? Still, with so much competition only one website can answer all four questions: Krillion. Krillion offers its consumers the information they are looking for in every part of their decision making process.

Recently, Krillion added a StockCheck feature which provides a real-time availability check for those looking to see if an item is in-stock before they head to the store; thus fitting the last piece of the puzzle for consumers looking to make their next purchase. Consumers should continue to look to Krillion in the future to see what new features they will roll out as the bridge they gap between online research and offline purchases.