A Trip Through eCommerce Past

My, how times have changed.

A new study recently released by the Pew Research Center looking at online shopping has shed an interesting light on how eCommerce has changed consumer behavior over the past decade-and-a-half. Here are some of the key findings.

The survey found that 79 percent of U.S. adults have made a purchase online, and 51 percent of consumers surveyed reported making at least one purchase using a mobile device. Additionally, 15 percent reported that they had purchased an item via a social media link.

While those numbers are near par for the course for consumers in 2016, compare them to the Pew Research Center’s first online shopping poll from June of 2000, when just 22 percent of U.S. consumers had reported making a purchase online. Likewise, in 2007, the rate of adults who had made an online purchase sat at 49 percent.

Aaron Smith, associate director of research at Pew, said, “The proliferation of ways to purchase in just a decade is incredible. A decade ago, buying something online using a cell phone wasn’t ‘a thing,’ and now half the population is doing that.”

Smith added that social media as a concept today is very different than what it was in 2007 when Facebook wasn’t a significant marketing channel for retailers.

While a majority of consumers in the U.S. shop online, Pew found that they do so relatively infrequently. Just 15 percent reported purchasing an item online on a weekly basis. Twenty-eight percent made online purchases a few times a month, and 37 percent reported making online purchases less than a few times monthly.

Additionally, the survey found that 65 percent of all online shoppers said that when given the choice, they generally prefer to buy from physical locations. Only 34 percent generally prefer to buy online. So it seems that while shoppers have increasingly moved to online channels compared to shoppers past, the majority still value brick-and-mortar commerce if and when they have to choose.