Dive Brief:
- The proportion of consumers who shop online every day has fallen 12 percentage points year over year from 21% to 9%, according to a Salsify survey of nearly 3,000 U.S., U.K. and Canadian shoppers.
- A challenging economic environment is making shoppers compare prices more carefully (39%) and decrease spending on certain product categories (38%). Meanwhile, 37% are searching for more affordable alternatives to buy.
- Though less than a fourth (22%) of respondents use AI to research products, only 14% trust those tools enough to use them regularly. A third of respondents said they don’t use AI shopping tools at all.
Dive Insight:
Salsify’s survey offers some insight into where shoppers are spending.
The proportion of shoppers buying new products in stores rose 11 percentage points year over year to 69%. By contrast, online marketplaces and retail websites saw more modest growth at 2 and 3 percentage points, respectively. Meanwhile, social shopping via platforms like TikTok and Instagram fell 12 percentage points from a year earlier to 22%, according to the survey.
Among shoppers who continue to spend via social media apps, a third are Gen Z and another third are millennials. Only 23% of Gen Xers and 22% of baby boomers shop on social media apps, the survey found.
“Consumers are recalibrating. They are being selective, they are verifying every detail, and they expect product information that gives them confidence from the start,” Dom Scarlett, research director at Salsify, said in a press release. “When content falls short, they walk away.”
Other research suggests that younger consumers still prefer to shop in person. Nearly three-fourths of Gen Zers still shop in person at least once a week, and a majority of the cohort considers doing so an experience, according to a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers by payments platform Adyen.
Though Salsify finds daily online shopping declining, e-commerce sales grew during the holiday season. Between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, U.S. consumers spent $257.8 billion online, a 6.8% increase from a year earlier, according to an Adobe Analytics analysis. Furthermore, that report found shoppers using generative AI tools drove a 693.4% surge in traffic to retail sites compared to last year.
Similar to Salsify’s findings, Gartner also found some distrust among consumers in AI shopping tools. In a survey of 377 consumers released last September, the research firm found that 53% said they lacked confidence in AI-driven search results. Meanwhile, 61% of the survey respondents said they wanted the option to turn off AI summaries.
