Online Consumer Center

Is online consumer behavior fundamentally different from offline consumer behavior? Consumer behavior online and offline has both similarities and differences. The e-commerce world is not as revolutionary as some would have us believe. For instances, the stages of the consumer decision process are basically the same whether the consumer is online or offline. On the other hand, the general model of consumer behavior requires modification to take into account new factors.

Web sites like the Online Consumer Center features include the content, design and functionality of the site. There are parallels in the analog world. For instance, it is well known that consumer behavior can be influenced by store design and understanding the precise movements of consumers through a physical store and can enhance sales if goods and promotions are arranged along the most likely consumer tracks.

For instance, because consumers almost invariably enter a store and move to the right, high margin items tend to be located there. And because it is known that consumers purchase fresh dairy products frequently, they are put at the back of grocery stores. Proper store design and precision tracking of consumers is not new – but its technical implementation on the web, its lowered cost, its ubiquity and its comprehensiveness on the web are new.

With respect to click stream behavior, a number of researchers have argued that understanding the background demographics of Internet users is no longer necessary, and not that predictive in any event. In most studies of the consumer behavior, background demographics account usually for less than 10% of the observed behavior. Many believe instead that most important predictors of online consumer behavior are the session characteristics and the click stream behavior of the people online. The theory is that this information will enable marketers to understand what the consumer was looking for at each moment and how much were they willing to pay, allowing the marketers to precisely target their communications.

Click stream marketing takes maximum advantage of the Internet environment. It presupposes no prior knowledge of the customer and can be developed dynamically as customers use the Internet. It gives us the most comprehensive data that can be well transformed into useful information thereby providing us with the maximum benefit and enabling us to get much better results in terms of ROI according to the Online Consumer Center.