Age Of Multi-Channel Marketing Is Dawning.

With reportedly 83.4 million US consumers researching products online then buying offline, retailers are blending the in-store, catalog and Internet shopping experiences — or else.

Retailers are writing a new set of rules for how to successfully engage customers, and eMarketer’s new report, Consumer Selling Online, explains why.

The Internet is empowering consumers — giving them the ability to compare old products, find new products, communicate with other shoppers and even find lower-cost products, all without walking into a single store.

“In this new fast-paced, compare-by-click shopping world,” says Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the report, “retailers have to meet consumers wherever, whenever and however they want to shop.”

In its Multi-Channel Shopping Study, “Holiday 2003,” DoubleClick reported that 57% of multi-channel shoppers browse in one channel and buy in another. Of the six possible combinations of browsing/buying behavior, the largest percentage (43%) of these shoppers browsed online but then bought in-store. In contrast, only 16% browsed in-store and bought online.

“The research phase of the consumer buying process can be perilous for online retailers whose products consumers typically research before buying,” says Mr. Grau. “Consumers today not only move easily across channels but also across retailers. So, for example, a customer might begin browsing at one retailer’s Web site, go to a third-party site to conduct research and then end up buying from a second retailer. In a store, or even a catalog, there is more friction to inhibit ‘shopping around,’ on the Internet, the next merchant is only a click away.”

Here are some of the research activities that consumers perform online:

Search for products and merchants

Find product reviews, feature comparisons, evaluations, etc.

Read comments from other users

Get up-to-the-minute information on sales, new products, etc.

Web sites (38%) are practically on par with stores (41%) as the primary place for multi-channel shoppers to research products, according to a study by ForeSee Results and FGI Research, conducted during the December 2004 holiday season.

Delving deeper, the survey found that the Web is favored as a research tool for particular product categories. Nearly one-half of the survey respondents buying electronics and computers and toys/books/games did their research online.

An EMC2 study found that the most popular Internet destination for research is search engines (46%) followed by navigating directly to a retail site (39%).

For more information at http://www.emarketer.com