Showrooming and webrooming are two succinct ways of defining practices that are widespread among online users.
What exactly do they entail for the retailer?
Showrooming and Webrooming
Showrooming refers to that attitude characterized by a visit to the store, to view certain products, which, however, is followed by an online purchase. Showrooming users often compare the prices they find at the point of sale with their smartphones and based on the results decide whether to buy immediately on the spot or through ecommerce. Price is not always the only lever: sometimes showroomers seek access to more information about a product or intend to check its availability, often filling in any lack of information from a salesperson.
In contrast, webrooming is when a user gathers a lot of information online about a brand or product, but then chooses to purchase it at the point of sale, physically going to the location .
In some cases, these terms are used almost oppositely, to indicate how the prevalence of one attitude over the other can determine the type of consumer one is dealing with: shoowroomers have a high propensity for ecommerce and digital in general, while webroomers have greater resistance, typically dictated by age or level of digitization. They get informed, but then prefer the “real” experience.
Such an assumption, however, is quite misleading because it forgets how these behaviors are the result of a fluid experience, made up of contexts and contingencies, where different purchase modes can coexist in the same consumer. To fully understand how consumption patterns are changing, it is not enough to classify them. In fact, in both cases, it is a matter of thinking carefully about the central role that mobile is playing in the process of browsing, buying, and the relationship between the user and the brand.
Two sides of the shopping experience
The bottom line is that consultations from mobile have now surpassed those from desktop. According to Comscore in March 2017, for the first time in Italy’s Total Digital Population (37.3 million unique Desktop and Mobile visitors), there is an overtaking of users accessing the Internet exclusively via mobile devices (9.3 million, or 25 percent of the total) over users accessing only from desktops (9.1 million, or 24 percent). Multi-platform users account for half of Italy’s digital population (51 percent), up 4 percentage points from the 47 percent recorded in September 2016.In light of this data – and the natural evolution of consumer behavior – we cannot therefore speak of showrooming and webrooming as separate activities in two specific time phases.
Rather, it is a continuous immersion in a shopping experience, where the tablet and the smartphone are real travel companions. Webroooming itself, in fact, is an activity carried out predominantly on the move: to entertain oneself, to optimize time between home and work needs, to learn more about solving a need here and now. The retail world, at least in Italy, has often suffered these new omnichannel practices and rarely anticipated them, considering them in some cases residual and limited to a few selected targets of users, younger and more digitized. Clearly, with such large and ever-growing numbers, it no longer makes sense to try to isolate these behaviors but rather to rethink and give absolute priority to a mobile strategy for customer engagement.
Showroomingand webrooming: what can retailers do?
An initial fundamental step is to reconsider one’s approach by imagining a consumer immersed in a continuous experience. It is important to remember that this is a generally distracted user whose attention is constantly depleted by an information overload. It is also true that this is a constantly connected consumer, and this represents a great opportunity. As noted by Google, which a few years ago introduced the concept of micromoments (snippets of user-brand interactions driven by an instantaneous need), any marketer cannot help but be fast, relevant in message and adept with the use of data.
Here are some tips for rethinking your strategy in this key.
– Showrooming: intercepting the user and leading them to finalize .
As we have seen, retail has the appropriate technology at its disposal not only to intercept the user as they browse the store, but also to recognize them. Knowing who he or she is, by unifying purchase and browsing data into a single profile, makes it possible to act promptly, leading the customer to close the transaction on the spot, with ad hoc incentives and remuneration to divert him or her from the intent to buy the same product elsewhere. It is also helpful if the salespeople themselves can make people feel that the experience is totally customized to their needs, taking this information into account themselves.
– Webrooming: save the idea and stimulate the in-store visit
Those who search online often do so for convenience. Comparing prices and documenting, reading reviews and getting recommendations from others has never been easier. So how do you attract the informed user to the point of sale? Certainly by learning by valuing that individual experience. Passing through the store can be appropriately stimulated with exclusive perks such as picking up a free gift. The important thing is not to lose the grip on the consumer while we have his or her attention. That’s why all the features that encourage “save for later,” screenshot, reminder (re-stocking, etc.) are key.
– Triggering: timely and location-based intervention
Marketers can drive communications by curating them appropriately based on the actions taken by the user, taking into account the website, the app, social media all the way to the physical store. Unifying the experience is critical to timely action. Therefore, a mobile strategy for retailers must always also consider where the person is at that precise moment, attracting them to the store, according to proximity logic.
– Life cycle: from research to decision
As we know there are different journeys per user, which change not only by access to individual touchpoints, but also by the decision stage they are in. A loyal customer is not the same as one on a first visit, one interested in specific products is not the same as one who is price sensitive. A mobile strategy therefore takes into account not only browsing behavior, but matches it with a classification based on consumption behavior, establishing a differentiated and not necessarily identical intervention for each user.
MobileCommerce
It is clear that retailers can no longer view mobile as a separate line item in their budget, as if it were a channel. Mobile is simply a connection point for shoppers between a purchase that can be made indifferently online or at the point of sale.
Mobile contributes substantially to decision making by accompanying the user in his or her omnichannel journey . The strategy moreover must take into account the appropriate differences between smartphones and tablets, learning not to view mobile Internet consumption as a unified approach. Although there are fewer tablets than smartphones in circulation, in-depth analyses show that when comparing the use of both, the evidence may be different: tablets in some cases bring more traffic and, more importantly, generate higher sales volumes.
Companies that do not pay sufficient attention to mobile commerce risk losing a major challenge, as well as substantial revenues. There are many good reasons to review one’s mobile strategy: the intimacy that binds a user to his or her device, the fact that he or she carries it with him or her at all times, the opportunity to be able to take timely and location-based action, and the fact that one can scan barcodes as well as pay. No enhancement of the shopping experience can therefore today do without mobile.
