Customers prefer marketplace to retailers for repeat purchases

Chart of the Day: Shopping moves away from retailers after the first purchase

If your company sells products that lend themselves to repeat purchases, your marketplace visibility is essential. Cars, laptops, and suits may be more one-off buys (unless you’re of a particularly affluent persuasion), but when customers want small items, they opt for online marketplaces over retailers and buying directly from brands.

Research from Salesforce and Publicis.Sapient found that 87% of people begin their search for a product on digital channels, up 16% from last year. When asked where this search starts, 28% of people prefer to start with Amazon, though 48% of people prefer Google (a large increase from 17% of people last year).

When searching for products for the first time, it would seem that the public prefers to find a retailer through Google, and then browse marketplaces for repeat purchases. Marketplaces topped various evaluation metrics in the report, including price (56%) and product availability.

The following definitions were used for the research:

• Brand: a company that creates and sells products under the same name (e.g. Nike)
• Retailer: a company that sells goods from multiple different brands (e.g. Walmart)
• Marketplace: a website that sells goods from different brands, retailers, and individual sellers (e.g. Amazon)

The research also found that 64% of shoppers say retailers don’t truly know them meaning it will take a personalized experience directly with a brand (thus increasing their sense of brand loyalty) to pull them away from marketplaces for repeat purchases.

• Source: Salesforce and Publicis.Sapient
• Sample: 6,000 people, split evenly between Australia, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and the United States
• Recommended resource: Website and e-commerce personalization guide