Ecommerce Facts, Quotes & Statistics that Will Blow Your Mind

If you’re getting your ecommerce marketing strategy off the ground, you may feel a little lost at first. Luckily, we’ve compiled 63 facts, quotes and statistics you can use as you’re developing your ecommerce strategy.

Read on to learn what thought leaders are saying regarding ecommerce marketing.

Part 1: Customize your customer service experience.

1. Eighty-nine percent of shoppers have stopped buying from online stores after they’ve experienced poor customer service. — RightNow
2. In solving your customer’s problems, should you take your time and answer effectively, or should you provide an immediate answer—even if you don’t have a solid solution yet? You decide: 17% of consumers would recommend a brand that provides a slow but effective solution. — Nielsen-McKinsey
3. On the other hand, 33% of consumers would recommend a brand that provides a quick but ineffective response. — Nielsen-McKinsey
4. Eighty-three percent of more than 5,000 consumers said they consistently needed some type of support during their online shopping. Thirty-one percent of them need online support immediately, while 40% of them require assistance within five minutes. — LivePerson
5. What makes your customers fall in love with your business? Seventy-three percent of them say they love you for your friendly employees or customer service representatives and 55% just love the way you easily give them access to information and support. — RightNow
6. You may consider adding live chat to your online store’s customer service strategies, as 31% of online shoppers from both the US and UK say they’d be more likely to purchase after a live chat. — BoldChat
7. “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.” – Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon
8. Love your new customers, but never forget to appreciate your old clients as well: It’s 7x more expensive to get a new customer than to retain an existing one. — Invesp
9. “Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.” — Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
10. Here’s something to encourage you to compete by value, not by price: By the year 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. — Customers 2020 Report
11. Not yet convinced that you need to prioritize your customer service skills? A customer is 4x more likely to go to your competitor if your problem is service-related (rather than price or product-related). — Bain & Company
12. Do you need more encouragement to improve your customer service efforts? Eighty-six percent of customers are willing to pay up to 25% more to get a better customer experience. — RightNow
13. How many of those customers are willing to shell out more for a better experience? Fifty-five percent. — Defaqto Research
14. As we say, not all customers are equal. Case in point: Ecommerce spending for new customers is on average $24.50, compared to $52.50 for repeat customers. — McKinsey
15. “Communication is at the heart of ecommerce and community.” — Meg Whitman, President and CEO of Hewlett-Packard
16. If you’re set on building brand loyalty, a loyalty program like offering points for purchases in your online store may help in increasing your sales, as one loyalty program member spends up to 13% more than two non-members. — Forrester Research Paper
17. Offering points as rewards can increase repeat shopper annual visits by up to 20%. In order to drive more customer visits to your online store, you can also reward them with points just for logging in or for referring a link to a friend. With the average U.S. household actively participating in 8.4 loyalty programs, you’d be a step behind your competition if you don’t offer this! — Shopify

Part 2: Define and segment your demographic.

18. Consumer spending hit $930 Billion USD, using mobile payment applications. — Upwork
19. Thirty-three percent of UK online sales occur after 6 p.m. — IMRG
20. Two-thirds of Americans aged 50-plus buy from etailers online. — Pew
21. Why should you also focus on tablet users? Consumers who visit your website via their tablets are nearly three times more likely to purchase something, as compared to those who visit your website via their smartphones. Tablet users also spend more than PC users. — Adobe
22. Eighty-two percent of Gen Zers prefer to receive promos and special discounts through their email. — Campaign Monitor
23. When shopping for products, 50% of millennial parents say they try to buy products that support causes or charities. — Fort Mill Times
24. Is your promotional post targeting the right market? Millennials spend more money online in a given year, compared to any other age group.
    See how Gen Z and millennials compare in this guide.
25. “You can’t wait for customers to come to you. You have to figure out where they are, go there, and drag them back to your store.” — Paul Graham, Y Combinator
26. Men from 18-34 years old ideally want to shop online. They also typically shop on auction sites and use shopping apps on their mobile devices. — Business Insider
27. In the US, 16% of men—compared to 13.3% of women—are interested in using their phone to purchase an item. — Kantar Media
28. More than 80% of the online population has used the internet to make a purchase. Additionally, more than 50% of these online population shopped online more than once. — Invesp
29. As noted by David Bell in his research, customers are more likely to take advantage of waived shipping fees that cost $6.99 than a discount that gives them $10 off. Your customers are more tempted by waived shipping fees rather than by discounts. Remember this the next time you struggle thinking of an effective promotional campaign.

Part 3: Spice up your social media presence.

30. In your social media platforms, it’s okay to promote your brand once in a while, but it’s better to connect with your customers all the time. More consumers aged 18 to 29 use a brand’s social media site for customer service interactions (43%) than for marketing (23%). — J.D. Power and Associates Social Media Benchmark Study)
31. Social media is the second preferred method of brand communication for millennials: For Gen Z, it’s the #1 preferred method of brand connection. — Campaign Monitor
32. Are you limiting your reach to Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest? Don’t forget about YouTube: Compared to other social media platforms, YouTube has the highest pages per visit, longest visit duration, and lowest average bounce rate. — Shareaholic
    Plus, according to our research, it’s one of Gen Z’s top methods of communication.
33. Fifty-three percent of customers expect brands to respond to their tweets within an hour, so be sure to reply quickly to those mentions of your online store. — Lithium
34. Want more retweets? The five most retweeted words are: you, Twitter, please, retweet, and post. — Social Marketing Writing
35. “Content-based marketing gets repeated in social media and increases word-of-mouth mentions: It’s the best way to gather buzz about a product.” — Marsha Collier
36. Only 12% of businesses feel that they’re using social media effectively. Don’t be one of them. —Harvard Business Review
37. “Don’t mistake social as the core of the shopping experience. Social is a means to make shopping better, not vice-versa.” — Cyriac Roeding, CEO of ShopKick
38. The “face with tears of joy” emoji is the most used emoji on Twitter. —  Campaign Monitor
39. Over 700M emojis are used on Facebook daily. — Campaign Monitor
40. Facebook posts peak around noon and after 7 pm—people log into their accounts during lunch breaks and after work. — Shopify
41. Men prefer to read blogs after working hours while women are more likely to read them in the morning. Keep these in mind when you’re sharing content via your social media platforms. — Shopify
42. Don’t just take our word for it. You’re accountable for your own testing too. “Everyone should collect their own data and find out when the best times to post, email, and tweet are.” — Sean Work, KISSmetrics
43. The ? “Smiling Poop” emoji got the highest read rate when used in email subject lines. — Campaign Monitor
44. You may try incorporating customer reviews in your online store’s official Facebook page. Ninety percent of respondents state that positive online reviews influence their purchasing decisions. — Marketing Land
45. Seventy-four percent of consumers depend on social media to guide their purchases. — Mobstac
46. Additionally, if a prospect likes your brand’s official page, keep your reputation up. Thirty-nine percent of Facebook users like brand pages so they can research different products. — Mobstac

Part 4: Mobilize your mobile marketing campaigns.

47. “Mobile users will do anything and everything desktop users will do, provided it’s presented in a usable way.” — Brad Frost
48. If your online store isn’t optimized for mobile, get ready for a lot of rejection. Thirty percent of mobile shoppers abandon a transaction if the shopping experience isn’t optimized for mobile. — MoPowered
49. Aside from optimizing your mobile website, you also need fast loading time, as 57% of mobile customers will abandon your site if they have to wait three seconds for a page to load. — Strangeloop Networks
50. Email marketing has an ROI of 3100%! — Direct Marketing Association
51. Sixty-one percent of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer a good mobile experience. —Latitude
52. “In the last twelve months, customers around the world ordered more than $1 billion worth of products from Amazon using a mobile device.” — Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon
53. Seventy-one percent of mobile purchasing decisions are most influenced by emails from companies. — Adobe
54. “I can’t overstate how mobile is changing how we interact with our consumers. We have to embrace these changes.” — Joel Anderson, CEO of Walmart
55. Mobile users are more likely to convert into customers. Seventy-eight percent of searches for local business information using a mobile device result in a purchase. — SearchEngineLand
56. To give you a clearer idea, here’s a list of conversions of different mobile devices: Two out of three mobile users prefer a mobile website to a mobile application. When your business is forcing your customer to download an app before they can purchase from you, this is perceived as an unnecessary barrier. — KISSmetrics
57. Online shoppers spend more time shopping on their mobile devices than their desktops. Forty-four percent of retail internet minutes are spent on mobile phones. Eleven percent of retail Internet minutes are spent on tablets. — Comscore

Part 5: Optimize your online store’s shopping experience.

58. During the checkout process, if your shipping and handling costs are too high, 44% of your customers will abandon the shopping cart outright. — North American Technographics Retail Online Survey
59. Twenty-three percent of online shoppers will abandon their shopping cart if they have to create a new user account. Instead of forcing them to create an account, encourage guest checkouts. — KISSmetrics
60. A staggering 67.45% of online shopping carts are abandoned. This means that, for every 100 potential customers, 67% will leave your online store without purchasing anything. — Baymard Institute
61. “The ecommerce industry is a force that no investor can afford to ignore.” — Cushla Sherlock, Corporate Communications, Credit-Suisse
62. “By 2022, brick and mortar retail spaces will be little more than showrooms.” — Eddie Machaalani & Mitchell Harper, Co-CEOs of BigCommerce
63. “Curation and personalization will be a big part of ecommerce moving forward.” — Danny Rimer, Partner at Index Ventures

Wrap up

Consider bookmarking this page, especially as you prepare a plan for your online business. You can use these statistics to prepare your ecommerce marketing strategy for the year to come.

Don’t have an ecommerce marketing strategy yet? Check out Campaign Monitor’s CM Commerce, an easy way to start your ecommerce email marketing. Learn more here.