Shopper Study Reveals How Consumers Decide to Buy: Touching is Key

Consumer marketing research firm Eye Faster recently conducted a major study encompassing a dozen stores from a variety of U.S. retailers to identify behavior patterns and generate insights into the shopping experience.

Mobile eye-tracking headsets were employed to observe shopper behavior and provide measurement at key levels of engagement.

Among the key conclusions:

• unplanned purchasing makes up the majority of purchases; and
• unplanned purchasing sharply declines during the last 20 percent of a shopping trip.

Shoppers see only a small portion of the in-store displays, and when they do it's just for a brief time during any individual trip. Consider the following survey findings:

• the typical shopper notices 32 displays; 
• this represents approximately 12 percent of the displays in-store; and
• most notices are very brief — less than one second.

The most actionable finding is related to purchasing after touching, which suggests that package design needs to not only catch shopper attention, but also encourage the shopper to interact.

For most categories, the longer a shopper spends in the category, the more likely they are to make a purchase. Noticing a product in the category doesn't guarantee that a shopper will buy, however. In fact, noticing products is only mildly positively correlated with purchasing; while noticing is required for purchase, it's not sufficient in isolation. Getting a shopper to pick up a product has the highest correlation with them ending up purchasing:

• 30 percent of all products held are purchased;
• 56 percent of shoppers that hold a product in a category will buy a product in the category; and
• that number increases to 62 percent if more than one product is touched.

Kirk Hendrickson is the CEO of Eye Faster, a provider of shopper research.