Social Networking Looked To For Retail

50% of Internet users research online before making any type of purchase

Typically doing their own research online saves time and made them more confident about their purchases.

Retailers’ sites play an important role in the research process, and respondents said the most critical capability for a retailer to have was customer reviews. A lack of user-generated reviews would cause nearly one-half (49%) of respondents to leave a retailer’s site.

Though the “2010 Social Shopping Study” found that customer reviews had a strong influence on the purchases of 71% of respondents—while only 25% said the same about Facebook fan pages—an earlier e-tailing group study of Web merchants found Facebook had caught on so strongly that more planned a presence on the social networking site in the next year than would have customer reviews.

social media still gets only a tiny slice of retailers’ online marketing budgets. Online merchants with annual sales of more than $100 million devote just 1% of their total marketing budget to social, compared with 39% that goes to paid search