Google Recommends Digital Navigation

With Black Friday over and Cyber Monday in full swing, online shopping is top of mind for many people - including me. Over time it has become a tradition for me to buy all of our Christmas presents on Black Friday and they’re all bought online. Why? Convenience. Online shopping allows me to buy presents for everyone in just a couple of hours and I don’t even have to wait in line.

Smart(phone) shopping

Looking at the preliminary numbers (from UK) from this year’s Black Friday it seems like I’m not the only one who prefer online shopping. According to data from retail analyst Springboard consumers continue to favor buying online and for the first time ever cellphones were the preferred method of shopping with 56% of all online transactions made via smartphones.

In a study by Google, nearly half of the respondents said they’d do all of their holiday shopping online if they could. However, interestingly enough, 61% of shoppers prefer to shop with brands that have a physical location rather than the ones that are online only but why is that if half of consumers prefer online shopping anyways?

Convenience vs. impatience

The truth is that we’re impatient. Even though we probably all love the convenience of online shopping, 80% of us will still go to the store to buy the things we need or want immediately. Other factors that drive shoppers in-store are the familiarity and comfort of going back to the same place. However, as mentioned above online shopping is still growing so physical retailers need to make an effort to keep driving customers in-store.

Merge online and offline with indoor navigation

If you want to keep luring shoppers into your physical store you need to focus on improving the in-store assistance by connecting the online and offline experience. According to Google a good way to do so is to invest in digital navigation and integrate it into your own app. This way customers can search for a product in the app while sitting at home, see the exact location within your store, and get turn-by-turn navigation directly to the item on the shelf.

While this has the potential to improve the assistance and overall experience at any large store or supermarket it’s - in our experience - especially the DIY retailers who are leading the way when it comes to digital navigation and merging the online and offline experience. This means that enthusiastic do-it-yourselfers don’t have to wait in slow moving lines to get help finding the items they need and the DIY centers satisfy customers needs for (re)searching online and assistance offline.

If you want to know more about what digital indoor navigation can do for your store, check out our retail solution below.