The product category is already the largest in ecommerce, comprising an estimated 21% of total web sales in the US, according to Euromonitor. Another market research firm, eMarketer, says that share will increase to 22.1%, or a staggering $108 billion, by 2018. Meanwhile in the UK the category is set to break the €20 billion mark in terms of annual sales in 2017.
Nice money if you can get it, but online sales are not the only indicator of the importance of online presence and performance for consumer electronics brands. In such a complex, high-value, high-engagement category it is rare for a shopper to enter a brick and mortar store to pick up anything from headphones to a new TV without first having done at least a modicum of research online.
Online Product Research in the New Retail Experience
Compared to many other ecommerce categories, consumer electronics has relatively long buying cycles. This means shoppers spend a lot more time trawling through brand, retail,and comparison websites researching their options before committing to a purchase. So what can look like a low conversion rate on many sites is in fact research that consumers engage in weeks and months before finally adding a chosen product to a basket. Similarly shoppers might spend a lot of time webrooming before finally making a purchase in-store.
What can brands do to speed up the process,and keep their products in the consideration set for the millions of shoppers who purchase consumer electronics products online and offline every year?
eCommerce Presence & Performance for Consumer Electronics Brands
The answer to that question is not that different to many other online categories. Consumer electronics requires all the usual incentives to help grease the wheels online: the right range, competitive Price & Promotions, reliable Availability, and great online store Search performance. However, the two online channel performance metrics that stand out as most critical for a research-intensive category such as consumer electronics are Content and Rating & Reviews.
Over the past 12 months we’ve carried out a number of studies across subcategories such as Laptops, Microwave Ovens, Blenders, and Coffee Makers to analyse how consumer electronics firms are executing for some key online presence and performance metrics. The analysis found that despite the maturity of the consumer electronics category in terms of online penetration, many brands still have a lot to do to optimize their ecommerce channel representation.
Which Consumer Electronics Brands Perform Best for Ratings & Reviews?
Our US Laptop study for example found that most brands performed well in terms of created content, but when it came to user generated content – Ratings & Reviews – they could be doing better. Even Apple, the out and out leader in the study, only scored 75%, while the second best brand was Samsung with 56% of its items in US online stores reaching our Ratings & Reviews minimum threshold – at least 20 reviews and an average rating of 4.0 or above. In the UK, where consumer engagement is generally lower, only 50% of Apple’s products reached the threshold.
In an earlier analysis we found the that the microwave category under-performed laptops, setting a very low bar for Ratings & Reviews performance. A fifth of the microwave product pages analysed had no Product Ratings at all and over a third of products had a negative average Rating. Of the 40 percent of items with positive Product Reviews, less than two thirds have twenty or more consumer comments, the minimum number for shoppers to consider the average Product Rating credible.
Ratings & Reviews are critically important in driving ‘add to basket'. According to Bright Local, 88% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations while 70% read consumer reviews before making a purchase.
Laptop brands are managing to do a better job in terms of created content, adding additional images to product landing pages and using video to explain product features. In the UK Laptop study HP leads the way with 97% of its product range (200+ SKUs) having multiple images on online store product landing pages for example, closely followed by Asus with 96%.
However, the conclusion of all five small appliance and consumer electronics studies we carried out during 2016 was that there is still plenty of work for brands to do to improve their online presence and performance if they are to reduce buying cycles and grow online and offline sales.
