The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from The Advertising Research Foundation

Chapter 7. Online Shopping and Buying

Search, shopping, and purchase all go together. No matter the purchase—car, airline tickets, camera, or camisole—shoppers research products throughout their buying journey. Online search plays a central role today, helping consumers find, consider, and select brands for purchase.

Anyone who has used a broadband connection at home or at work appreciates the speed and richness of the online experience, and the services now available, such as streaming music, video, and shopping. Broadband adoption, now mainstream (Pew 2006), provides consumers with greater ease and convenience for researching purchases online and shopping across all channels.

We take the view that calling shopping or researching products and services “search” is really too narrow; it easily misleads us to focus on online search (a big player) and ignore offline sources that consumers routinely consult—Yellow Pages, catalogs, stores, newspaper or magazine ads, or trusted opinions. We overcome this bias by broadening the term “search” to “shopping research,” so we can be as inclusive as possible. We do the same with buying, emphasizing that customers shop online, but usually complete their transactions offline through stores, toll-free calls to catalog call centers, or mailing an order form. Customers routinely use multiple information sources and retail channels for shopping, then combine them in their own ways. And they follow their own paths, which may be quick and direct, ...