New Study: Big-Ticket Purchases Slowly Crossing Over From Offline to Online Channels

As the pandemic recedes and a sense of normalcy slowly returns to everyday life, more consumers are thinking about the big-ticket purchases they crave — and how to pay.

“Digital Platforms: How Consumers Shop and Pay for Big-Ticket Purchases,” a PYMNTS and Rightpoint collaboration, delves into the topic by surveying more than 2,900 consumers about their buying outlook in five key categories: insurance, automobiles, healthcare services, real estate and home remodeling.

While intent findings vary by a seemingly small margin between 2020 and 2021, the difference is meaningful. As the study states, “64% of respondents say they are ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ likely to purchase at least one high-value product or service in the next 12 months, whereas 62% did so during the previous year. This modest-looking increase belies larger jumps for most individual big-ticket categories, because more consumers expect to make purchases in multiple categories than they did last year.

Researchers found that slightly more than half intend to lay out larger sums for healthcare services, “up from 40% in the last year, and other notable jumps relate to insurance (33% from 31%), automobiles (26% from 20%), home remodeling (21% from 12%) and real estate (14% from 7%).”

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See also: Digital Platforms: How Consumers Shop and Pay for Big-Ticket Purchases

Keeping One Foot Offline

Among standout findings from “Digital Platforms: How Consumers Shop and Pay for Big-Ticket Purchases” is the path many consumers take, combining online and offline modalities.

“Digital consumers typically keep one foot in the offline world when it comes to big-ticket spending,” per the study. “Respondents both performed prepayment interactions and paid digitally for just 12% of their high-value purchases, while 88% involved offline-only engagement or payment or both. Insurance and real estate sectors had the highest rates of purchases with both digital engagement and payment — 19% and 16%, respectively.”

Additionally, researchers found that online engagement with offline payment “is the most common way digital consumers buy big-ticket products and services, in fact. Such individuals made 27% of their purchases this way.”

The continued strength of offline engagement is eye-opening, giving the extent of the digital shift in consumer buying behavior since 2020, but not in all areas.

As the study states, “Digital research proved most popular for real estate (70%) and automobiles (62%) — the only category for which consumers preferred digital methods over offline ones — and less so for remodeling (53%), insurance (47%) and healthcare services (32%).”

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See also: Digital Platforms: How Consumers Shop and Pay for Big-Ticket Purchases

Integrated Payments Unlock Big-Ticket Potential Online

Also surprising is how much payments for big-ticket purchases still skew toward offline methods, despite the availability of and confidence in digital payments.

According to the study, “Consumers favor offline channels even more strongly when it comes time to pay for big-ticket products and services. This is expected largely because many major transactions traditionally involve signing paper contracts and settling bills in person. Respondents paid offline for 73% of their purchases in the last 12 months — mostly in person (45%) or by phone (20%) — doing so digitally for only 27% of their transactions.”

While third-party review sites offering few embedded payment options is cited as a cause for the online/offline split observed in survey responses, consumers who use those options when offered report satisfying experiences, pointing to untapped potential in this area.

“[Certain] third-party review sites do offer robust integrated payment options, and the engagement-payment gap is influenced in these cases by the quality of the experiences consumers have with these channels,” the study stated. “The small share of consumers who conduct prepayment interactions and pay through third-party review sites have broadly positive outcomes,” though these can “be less pleasing on the whole than those via other channels.”

See also: Digital Platforms: How Consumers Shop And Pay For Big-Ticket Purchases