Consumers might just type in the URL of a favorite e-commerce site to do some shopping online, but the vast majority make their way to purchase from some other destination. That is the finding of a study by GSI Commerce and Forrester Research.
According to the findings, 77 percent of hard goods and 82 percent of soft goods bought online during last year's Christmas selling season started with a search, an email or some other stimulus.
The research found that many shoppers in the study were exposed to multiple marketing messages before making a purchase. Forty-five percent of hard goods and 53 percent of soft goods required at least two contact points before the buy was made.
Email and search are the two most effective means to drive purchases with 40 percent of hard good transactions and 60 percent of soft good purchases starting from either of those two sources.
Interestingly, social media was largely ineffective in online sales generation. Only two percent of holiday sales were connected to social sites. The one bright spot with social media was directly related to the sale of soft goods between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.
"While hard goods retailers in this study experienced no change in the number of orders that resulted from links from social sites, soft goods retailers experienced a 45 percent lift in orders that resulted from those same types of links on Cyber Monday versus during the rest of the holiday season. The limited time nature of web holiday deals during these key dates likely compelled shoppers to share such messages with their friends," the report stated.
Fiona Dias, executive vice president of strategy and marketing for GSI Commerce, told Mashable, "The best analogy is in the South; a lot of people go to church on Sunday. If you go with the theory that you should market where the people are, then you should be running off to market during church services. Facebook has the same analogy. Buying things from retailers is maybe 10th on the list of things they want to do on Facebook."