Plenty of consumers prefer shopping from behind a computer screen, clicking on the shoes, laptops and books they want to buy. But a surprisingly large number of consumers still prefer shopping the old-fashioned way, visiting stores in person to find the goodies they want to buy.
That’s the finding from a new Coldwell Banker Commercial Affiliates survey released this morning.
According to the survey, nearly half of respondents – 47 percent – said that they prefered to make purchases in-store instead of shopping online.
“Despite doomsday headlines about the retail industry and how e-commerce has taken over, our survey has found that Americans still enjoy and remain loyal to in-store shopping,” said Fred Schmidt, president and chief operating officer of Coldwell Banker Commercial Affiliates in a written statement.
This number is actually trending up. When asked whether they preferred online shopping or shopping at a brick-and-mortar store in 2016, 43 percent of respondents said that they’d rather shop in a store than online.
“All in all, this shows that brick-and-mortar retail remains steady, but there is work to be done to keep the industry relevant,” Schmidt said.
The survey was conducted in August of 2017 by Harris Poll on behalf of Coldwell Banker Real Estate.
The resiliency of brick-and-mortar shopping wasn’t the only interesting result from the poll, of course. The survey also found that shoppers today aren’t hesitant to mix their shopping with technology.
For instance, 35 percent of respondents said that in-store technology such as self-serve kiosks and checkouts improves their shopping experience. A little more than four in 10 younger Millennials said that they are interested in in-store tracking and notifications. The survey found, too, that 17 percent of respondents were open to using augmented or virtual reality when shopping in stores.
