Recently, 14 IndieCommerce and IndieLite websites gave their customers the option of filling out a survey about the online shopping experience they had just completed. Over a seven-day period, 622 customers submitted responses.

The aggregated results are being used as part of the IndieCommerce upgrade research project that is currently underway. Over the next few weeks, the IndieCommerce team will be sharing some of these results with you. 

One question asked about the purchase customers just completed, whether it was for a specific book or item they intended to purchase before visiting the site; whether it contained books and items the customer was not familiar with prior to visiting the site; or both.

The response to this question was very clear: 79.29 percent of respondents visiting IndieCommerce and IndieLite websites were looking for specific books. These results seem to support the idea that most customers know what they are going to buy when shopping online.

The majority of these titles were found by the customer using the search engine on a store’s website. This limits their discovery process to the titles that appear in search results for each title they are searching for. With these survey results in mind, there may be untapped opportunities to introduce customers to books other than those they were specifically looking for.

Some of the options we are considering for future upgrades to IndieCommerce and IndieLite would expose online customers to titles that might interest them — ones they were not specifically looking for. The trick here is how to do this without hindering their checkout experience, but still giving them the opportunity to discover titles that might interest them.

Be sure to watch BTW next week for more survey results.