OneDayOnly makes its living from discounts, so it has a keen interest in how shoppers feel about them, and its latest survey brings mixed news. Eight in ten of the online shoppers it asked now hold off buying until something is on sale. Ask the same people about Black Friday, though, and just 7% think all of its discounts are real.
The survey, called the ODOmeter, ran over two weeks in August and is meant to follow what online shoppers do with their money when it is tight. Its 2,410 respondents lean towards OneDayOnly's own customers, and two-thirds of them are women, so it describes shoppers like them, not the whole country.
Shopping like an auditor
These are not relaxed shoppers. Four in ten say their household is worse off than a year ago, against about a quarter who say things have improved, and rising food prices are the biggest pressure for 69%. So they slow down: they read reviews, check the delivery cost and hunt for a code before they pay. Some leave items sitting in an online cart for hours or days to decide whether they really need them, a habit the survey calls cart cooling.
That care makes them hard to fool. One respondent wrote that retailers "inflate the actual price of things so that the discounted price seems like a bigger discount", and added: "I fact-check all prices before I buy." Four in ten shop Black Friday every year, yet 37% think most of its discounts are misleading, and 14% asked retailers, unprompted, to stop marking up the "was" price ahead of a sale.
The fee that spoils the saving
The complaint that tops the list has nothing to do with the markdown. When asked what annoys them about buying online, delivery charges won easily: 65% named them among their top three frustrations, well clear of worries about judging quality on a screen. In their own words, 40% said cheaper delivery would get them spending, and the survey calls high shipping charges the main reason people abandon a cart. "Delivery costs are the single biggest factor that makes me walk away from purchases," another respondent wrote.
The survey's advice to retailers is to prove the saving, because that is what these shoppers check. OneDayOnly works out the savings it says it has handed shoppers by taking the original retail price and subtracting its own, before shipping.
