New Study Shows Digital Pickup And Delivery Features No Longer Optional For US Merchants

In-store and curbside pickup has taken off in the United States, where eCommerce shoppers pick up their online orders four times as much as consumers in Australia, Brazil, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. What is more is that among those that do, 47% wind up buying more on their trip to the store.

Figures like these make it clear that there is no such thing as brick-and-mortar or online sales in the increasingly cross-channel U.S. retail market anymore: It is all just shopping.

The 2022 Global Digital Shopping Playbook: U.S. Edition delves into the details of the key drivers that bring this brave new cross-channel U.S. retail market into the limelight. PYMNTS surveyed 13,000 consumers and 3,100 businesses across six key countries to learn more about the trends that drive consumers’ shopping decisions in an ever-more interconnected brick-and-mortar retail space, and how they are using physical stores to enhance their online shopping journeys.

Key findings from our research include the following:

• U.S. shoppers are less mobile-centric than consumers in other countries — but that is changing quickly. Twenty-four percent more brick-and-mortar shoppers in the U.S. used their smartphones for shopping in stores in 2021 than in 2020, using them chiefly to earn rewards.

• U.S. merchants get high marks from their shoppers because they provide the shopping and payment features their customers want most. These include free shipping, promotional codes and coupons that can help reduce prices, policies that make it easy for shoppers to resolve disputes, secure data storage services and other features that can inspire consumer trust in their merchants.

• U.S. merchants are nevertheless being held back by not making product recommendations readily available, not price matching competitors and not making their buy now, pay later (BNPL) options readily apparent. Not only are U.S. merchants less likely than average to offer product recommendations on their sites and price match competitors, but many local shoppers do not realize how many local merchants offer BNPL options.

These are just a few of the key trends that make the U.S. retail space unique on the world stage. The 2022 Global Digital Shopping Playbook: U.S. Edition provides a ground-level view of what U.S. shoppers now expect from their retail experiences — and how well local merchants are gearing up to deliver those expectations.

To learn more about the key digital shopping features that can help U.S. merchants gain an upper hand against their competitors, download the report.