Table of Contents

Our five key points:

  • Value shoppers are customers who want to save money and get great service, and they will shop around to do so.
  • Understanding the shopping secrets behind attracting these kinds of buyers could boost your bottom line.
  • The broader economic situation often impacts the value shopper's buying process.
  • Shoppers may still purchase full-price products if they get a better level of customer service.
  • Thorough integration of your business data via a platform like Integrate.io helps you better research and understand your customers’ needs.

Value shoppers are the savvy buyers, the ones always on the lookout for the best deals and who knows where to find every discount and coupon. If you're an e-commerce retailer, the importance of understanding your value shoppers can’t be overstated. Consumers searching for a great deal will absolutely look elsewhere if they’re not impressed by your online offerings. So, how do you attract these valuable and profitable shoppers to your store — and keep them coming back? We look at five secrets that help you understand your value shoppers and the critical importance of collating your consumer data with a platform like Integrate.io.

The Volume of Value Shoppers Changes With the Economy

The recent pandemic situation seems to have increased the number of value shoppers on the lookout for deals and discounts. Forty percent of consumers threw aside brand loyalty and started to shop around for better value during the pandemic, according to research from McKinsey. One notable change was the rise of shopping online, ideally placing e-commerce businesses in a position to benefit from these changing habits. Forty-eight percent of shoppers state that their shopping habits may have permanently changed — which leaves 52% of shoppers you need to consistently impress.

“Shopper economics” is a term used to define how shoppers make their decisions about where to shop and what products or services to buy. Unsurprisingly, shopper economics is impacted by the broader economic situation. If the costs of particular products go up, value shoppers will go out of their way to find the best-value option in terms of price, service, and quality. Keeping your eye on the wider market can help you draw in those customers by pre-empting changes in shopping habits before they happen.

Value Shoppers Know That “Value” Is Not the Same as “Cheap”

There’s a misconception that price is everything when it comes to value shopping. Make no mistake — price is incredibly important to shoppers. From Walmart to Amazon, Costco to Whole Foods, shoppers will take the time to find the product with the best price — but the best price isn’t always the cheapest product. Other factors consumers want information on include:

  • Product quality
  • Origin – where was it made?
  • Carbon footprint and sustainability
  • Ethical implications, e.g., avoiding funding slavery
  • Consumer reviews
  • Brand reputation
  • Product features – will the product solve other problems the consumer has?
  • Payment methods – can the customer quickly pay by both debit and credit card?

IBM recently suggested that consumers are far more interested in how products align with their personal values. As many as 44% may ultimately make their final purchase choice based on ethics and sustainability rather than price. Finding out what consumers are saying about your products could be the key to honing them and re-marketing to align your strategy with your target demographic’s needs.

ETL (extract, transform, load) from Integrate.io is an effective way to get all your consumer data, from CRMs and even Facebook Ads, to understand how your customers engage with your products.

Customer Experience Is a Part of Value

A recent Guardian article highlights that a smooth online experience could be the key to winning and retaining customers. In the article, a managing director of a major U.K. finance group points out that if a website or online store is welcoming, easy to use, and simple to navigate, what’s the point in looking elsewhere? Customer experience is very much a part of the “value” proposition because customers are absolutely willing to pay more for better treatment. In fact, a survey by PWC indicates that 73% of consumers make buying choices based on the level of customer service they receive.

For online retailers from grocery stores to B2B service providers, that means avoiding overstuffing your site with features that make it clunky, ensuring pop-ups are relevant and useful, having your best offers available from the landing page, and creating a seamless checkout experience that avoids customers clicking away and increasing your cart abandonment rate.

Value Shoppers Are Inconsistent

By their very nature, value shoppers aren’t as loyal or consistent as those dedicated customers you can rely on for purchases every month or every year. They’re more likely to appear when prices rise at your competitors’ e-shops or when other factors affect the e-commerce market, such as supply chain issues and shortages. They may be looking for online shopping options with cheaper delivery fees, better service, or even just a wider range of products, so they only have to shop once.

Market research can be the key to understanding what types of shoppers are shopping where and why. We touched on this a little with shopper economics, but you have a wealth of data available to you via your online store — whether you use Shopify, BigCommerce, or your own website — plus data from any blogs you have, your social media accounts, and your CRM. By using a platform like Integrate.io to collate this data in a destination such as a data warehouse, you can quickly assess which content is sending customers to your store and which is not drawing any attention at all, and also assess the real-time impact of your marketing strategy. This allows you to hone it to better attract those one-time shoppers looking for a great deal while not abandoning your core customer base.

Transform Value Shoppers Into Loyal Customers With Incentives

Of course, not every value shopper will be a one-time customer. In addition, to fine-tuning your marketing efforts, you can hook those value shoppers with incentives that encourage them to return. These may include a discount on their next purchase, a loyalty program, or more concrete perks such as free samples or a product testing scheme for new products.

Limited-time offers can tempt shoppers to stay on your site. Highlighting price comparisons with last year’s catalog can show your consistency or competitiveness in your market — especially if you’ve managed to keep prices low where your competitors have had to raise theirs. By far the best way to increase e-commerce sales is to encourage repeat purchases, so use your carefully integrated business data to find out which previous loyalty schemes and incentives have been the most effective and which demographics of customers respond best to these.

Integrate.io Collates Data to Help You Please Value Shoppers

All your customers get a better experience when you use data about their prior behaviors to help keep them happy. Ensuring you have access to a data integration platform like Integrate.io helps you collate data from a variety of e-commerce products straight into your data warehouse, allowing for faster analysis and insights that can really boost your customer experience.

Integrate.io is a new, easy-to-use ETL platform that extracts data from just about any source you can think of, from your social media marketing activities to your in-house customer account databases. Transform and tidy up your data, and use automation from the super-fast change data capture (CDC) platform to ensure any changes update across all your systems as often as they occur in real-time. Reverse ETL empowers multidirectional data transfer, meaning you can update Salesforce or other systems with the updates you glean from e-commerce SaaS. For more information about our cloud-based platform with deep e-commerce capability, schedule a demo today.