And The Winner For Who Dominates Consumers’ Retail Searches Is…

It’s one thing to guess that Amazon might be the dominant starting point for retail searches online (and it is); it’s another to look at the specific numbers that bear that out.

In a recent survey commissioned by eCommerce software startup BloomReach (via Re/code), 44 percent of all U.S. shoppers who responded cited Amazon as their first stop for eCommerce, be it to purchase or research potential purchases. Google took second place in the survey in that regard at 34 percent, with all other retailers’ websites taking 21 percent.

While these numbers are certainly an impressive showing of Amazon’s dominance in the eCommerce space, they’re also a natural conclusion of the results of the deep research dive that PYMNTS conducted and published back in August during the R2 Summit | Reinventing Retail.

Patrick Gauthier, VP of Amazon Payments, participated with PYMNTS on that research project (conducted in July 2015), which surveyed more than 2,000 online and mobile shoppers about where they begin their shopping journey, why they buy on a particular site and what they feel comfortable using to pay for their purchases.

In the PYMNTS study, marketplaces — a field that includes Amazon — were the top choice of starting point for the online retail journey at 64 percent, while “trust in the site” was most cited among consumers (23 percent) as the prime motivating factor in why they buy.

As Gauthier observed at the time, the findings indicated the importance for online shoppers in their relationship with a retailer — something that gives the familiar Amazon an advantage over competitors, even superseding matters such as price or shipping.

“You need a strategy that is about more than being present,” commented Gauthier at R2. “You need a strategy that is about being present where your customers are because if you are not, then you are not being customer-centric. This is a really profound and important finding … There’s no such thing as a relationship without trust.”

Of the overall results of the PYMNTS study, Gauthier went on to remark: “What I see here is what I call an Amazon generation … There is an Amazon generation. It’s not about Amazon the supplier. It’s about how people who have grown up buying online have been disproportionately shopping online as the attributes of the sample that we saw shows us. That tells me something.”

Based on the results from the BloomReach study, it would appear as though that “something” is what a vast number of consumers are continuing to tell the world of online commerce.

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