Reserve Room for Webrooming

Webrooming shoppers come into your brick-and-mortar store having done their homework online, often scouring the websites of a range of retailers, and now ready to make the purchase in a face-to-face transaction from you. Webrooming is a counterpart to showrooming, in which the shopper surveils items in your store, then makes the purchase online, usually from a retailer other than you. A range of surveys indicates that webrooming is currently more common than showrooming.
     That’s good news. Webrooming beats showrooming in benefits for you since you’re more likely to get the sale, you reduce the time spent educating the shopper, and when a shopper is in your store, the probability of additional purchases climbs.
     Researchers at Spain’s University of Zaragoza explored the psychology of the webrooming shopper to help you get the best of those advantages. The studies were conducted in the fashion sector. The conclusions apply most clearly to retail items which carry identity significance for the shopper, such as technology, vehicles, and personal enhancement categories. These are the sorts of items for which consumers would put the time into webrooming or showrooming, as distinguished from commodity products such as most work clothes and house cleaning categories.
     Smart shopping does apply to all the categories, however. A consumer’s conclusion that they are a smart shopper comes from perceptions that the results of their shopping justify their expenditures of time, money, travel, and other limited resources. Feelings of smart shopping are more prevalent when a consumer can use both ecommerce and brick-and-mortar browsing, so both webrooming and showrooming generate these feelings. But the Zaragoza studies find that webrooming generates more than does showrooming. This is because webroomers come away highly confident that their purchase is customized to their desired identity.
     To make this most likely:

• Maintain for the webrooming information gatherer a highly informative, highly understandable website which is easy to navigate and prominently branded with your name. Position your brand as a highly trustworthy source of objective information.
• When the webrooming prospect is in your store, keep it quick to give the feeling of good use of time, but don’t be so quick that you fail to personalize the purchase. With most shoppers, you’ll present more than one alternative. This gives a sense of control, increasing purchase likelihood. With webroomers who don’t want to evaluate alternatives, still ask what led to their choice and offer suggestions if necessary.

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