Attitudes About Online Shopping: By Household Income

Like everything in life, online shopping has it “upsides” and its “downsides”. Let’s look at these and then map them over to household incomes. In terms of the attitudinal impact, you might be surprised (even alarmed) by what you see…   

Just to be clear, the typical upsides of online shopping include: 

* Convenience - you can shop anytime, anywhere
* Efficiency - it’s fast and you never fight for a parking spot
* Selection - you’ll often find items on the web that you can’t find at the mall

And the typical downsides include:

* Privacy fears - especially when sharing credit card info and personal info online
* Concerns about not seeing before buying - on the web, there’s no touchy feel time
* Perceived complexity - bad check-outs poison the punch for many consumers

People are people, but when we directly map these online shopping attitudes over to income, things get a little wacky.     

You see, the general trends indicate the higher the household income level, the higher the passion for online shopping. Yay because it also means these households tend to have higher disposable incomes which means bigger spends and more revenue for you - oh wonderful e-retailer.

On top of that, the higher the household income, the more important “convenience” fits into the equation. In fact, about 4 out of 10 high income households see ”convenience” as a major upside. I believe this relates to the fact that higher income households have busier schedules (between professional obligations, social obligations, family obligations and all the other obligations). And by virture of the busy factor, ”free time” is precious so anything that can make free time happen is awesome….and online shopping has proven to be one source of ”awesomeness”. All in all, high income households see the online shopping “upsides” outweighing the online shopping “downsides”.

On the flip side, only about 2 out of 10 lower income households appreciate the convenience of online shopping. Not sure how anyone (regardless of income) doesn’t agree that online shopping is convenient, but opinions are opinions (right?). Lower income households also don’t see online shopping as a time-saver. Again, I don’t know how anyone can disagree that online shopping doesn’t save time, but hey, to each their own (right?).

So if we look at this study, the “upsides” aren’t so “up” for our lower income households. But is it only because of their income? I’ll share my thoughts on that momentarily.

First I want you to scroll back up and zoom into the “Attitudes about Online Shopping” chart again (Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project Survey, September 2007). Pay attention to the huge attitudinal differences between household incomes when you specifically look at the “downside” areas of online shopping. At first blush, I find these numbers a little wild.

For example, when you look at concerns related to using a credit card or giving personal information online, almost half of the low income families strongly agree this is an issue.  Yet only a quarter of the high income households see it as an issue? What’s with that?  Considering high income households typically have more at stake (in terms of potential risk due to higher credit levels and greater fraud losses), one would think they would be more concerned in this area. But apparently they are not, so what do these stats really mean?

In my opinion, these stats measure attitudes that go way beyond household income levels. Sure income matters, but on top of income lies so much more - i.e. education, training, access to computers, etc.

For example…

1. If you’re a low income household with minimal exposure to computers and/or computer training, how can you find online shopping anything but complicated? Pretty hard to fill up an online shopping cart if you’re not comfortable on a computer to start with.

2. Or if you’re a low income household who isn’t online and/or doesn’t own a computer, how can online shopping be convenient? For people without access to a computer in their home, shopping online means going to the public library or a friend’s home. May as well go to the mall, don’t you think?

And by the way, these 2 points above could apply to ANY income level. How about that! I daresay this final point could render this whole study moot. But it doesn’t. Rather it stresses the importances of not taking every report literally. Instead, question what you read and dig a little deeper. This is especially true when you’re talking about the ever-complicated, yet always adored customer.

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Posted in Carolyn Gardner, Conversion, eCommerce