Four Key Takeaways from Google and Quantum Metric’s Back-to-School Retail Benchmark Study
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Is it September yet? Hardly! School is barely out for the summer. But according to Google and Quantum Metric research, the back-to-school and off-to-college shopping season – which in the U.S. is second only to the holidays in terms of purchasing volume1 – has already begun. For retailers, that means planning for this peak season has kicked off as well.
We’d like to share four key trends that emerged from Google research and Quantum Metric’s Back-to-School Retail Benchmarks study of U.S. retail data, explore the reasons behind them, and outline the key takeaways.
- Out-of-stock and inflation concerns are changing the way consumers shop. Back-to-school shoppers are starting earlier every year, with 41% beginning even before school is out – even more so when buying for college1. Why? The behavior is driven in large part by consumers’ concerns that they won’t be able to get what they need if they wait too long. 29% of shoppers start looking a full month before they need something1.
Back-to-school purchasing volume is quite high, with the majority spending up to $500 and 21% spending more than $1,0001. In fact, looking at year-over-year data, we see that average cart values have not only doubled since November 2021, but increased since the holidays1. And keep in mind that back-to-school spending is a key indicator leading into the holiday season.
That said, as people are reacting to inflation, they are comparing prices, hunting for bargains, and generally taking more time to plan. This is borne out by the fact that 76% of online shoppers are adding items to their carts and waiting to see if they go on sale before making the purchase1. And, to help stay on budget and reduce shipping costs, 74% plan to make multiple purchases in one checkout1. That carries over to in-store shopping, when consumers are buying more in one visit to reduce trips and save on gas.
2. The omnichannel theme continues. Consumers continue to use multiple channels in their shopping experience. As the pandemic has abated, some 82% expect that their back-to-school buying will be in-store, and 60% plan to purchase online. But in any case, 45% of consumers report that they will use both channels; more than 50% research online first before ever setting foot in a store2. Some use as many as five channels, including video and social media, and these 54% of consumers spend 1.5 times more compared to those who use only two channels4.
And mobile is a big part of the journey. Shoppers are using their phones to make purchases, especially for deadline-driven, last-minute needs, and often check prices on other retailers’ websites while shopping in-store. Anecdotally, mobile is a big part of how we ourselves shop with our children, who like to swipe on the phone through different options for colors and styles. We use our desktops when shopping on our own, especially for items that require research and represent a larger investment – and our study shows that’s quite common.
3. Consumers are making frequent use of wish lists. One trend we have observed is a higher abandonment rate, especially for apparel and general home and school supplies, compared to bigger-ticket items that require more research. But that can be attributed in part to the increasing use of wish lists. Online shoppers are picking a few things that look appealing or items on sale, saving them in wish lists, and then choosing just a few to purchase. Our research shows that 39% of consumers build one or two wish lists per month, while 28% said they build one or two each week, often using their lists to help with budgeting1.
4. Frustration rates have dropped significantly. Abandonment rates aside, shopper annoyance rates are down by 41%, year over year1. This is despite out-of-stock concerns and higher prices. But one key finding showed that both cart abandonment and “rage clicks” are more frequent on desktops, possibly because people investing time on search also have more time to complain to customer service.
And frustration does still exist. Some $300 billion is lost each year in the U.S. from bad search experiences5. Data collected internationally shows that 80% of consumers view a brand differently after experiencing search difficulties, and 97% favor websites where they can quickly find what they are looking for5.
Lessons to Learn
What are the key takeaways for retailers? In general, consider the sources of customer pain points and find ways to erase friction. Improve search and personalization. And focus on improving the customer experience and building loyalty. Specifically:
80% of shoppers want personalization6. Think about how you can drive personalized promotions or experiences that will drive higher engagement with your brand.
46% of consumers want more time to research1. Drive toward providing more robust research and product information points, like comparison charts, images, and specific product details.
43% of consumers want a discount1, but given current economic trends, retailers may not be offering discounts. In order to appease budget-conscious shoppers, retailers can consider other retention strategies such as driving loyalty using points, rewards, or faster-shipping perks.
Be sure to keep returns as simple as possible so consumers feel confident when making a purchase, and reduce possible friction points if a consumer decides to make a return. 43% of shoppers return at least a quarter of the products they buy and do not want to pay for shipping or jump through hoops1.
How We Can Help
Google-sponsored research shows that price, deals, and promotions are important to 68% of back-to-school shoppers.7 In addition, shoppers want certainty that they will get what they want. Google Cloud can make it easier for retailers to enable customers to find the right products with discovery solutions. These solutions provide Google-quality search and recommendations on a retailer’s own digital properties, helping to increase conversions and reduce search abandonment. In addition, Quantum Metric solutions, available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, are built with BigQuery, which helps retailers consolidate and unlock the power of their raw data to identify areas of friction and deliver improved digital shopping experiences.
We invite you to watch the Total Retail webinar “4 ways retailers can get ready for back-to-school, off-to college” on demand and to view the full Back-to-School Retail Benchmarks report from Quantum Metric.
Sources:
1. Back-to-School Retail Benchmarks report from Quantum Metric
2. Google/Ipsos,Moments 2021, Jun 2021, Online survey, US, n=335 Back to School shoppers
3. Google/Ipsos, Moments 2021, Jun 2021, Online survey, US, n=2,006 American general population 18+
4. Google/Ipsos, Holiday Shopping Study, Oct 2021 – Jan 2022, Online survey, US, n=7,253, Americans 18+ who conducted holiday shopping activities in past two days
5. Google Cloud Blog, Nov 2021, “Research: Search abandonment has a lasting impact on brand loyalty”
6. McKinsey & Company, “Personalizing the customer experience: Driving differentiation in retail”
7. Think with Google, July 2021, “What to expect from shoppers this back-to-school season”
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Quick Tips to Get the Most Out of Cloud Spanner
Today, IT Admins and DBAs are inundated with thankless tasks. But they no longer have to deal with that. With Cloud Spanner, they can focus on value-add and innovation instead of maintenance. Creating or scaling a globally replicated database for mission-critical apps now takes a handful of clicks.
Industry-leading high-availability and Google-grade security as defaults, not expensive add-ons, help ensure your apps stay online and more secure.
Cloud Spanner is a powerful product, but many users do not maximize its benefits.
It is the first scalable, enterprise-grade, globally-distributed, and strongly consistent database service built for the cloud specifically to combine the benefits of relational database structure with a non-relational horizontal scale.
This combination delivers high-performance transactions and strong consistency across rows, regions, and continents with an industry-leading 99.999% availability SLA, no planned downtime, and enterprise-grade security. Cloud Spanner revolutionizes database administration and management and makes application development more efficient.
This video highlights best practices, strategies for optimizing applications and workloads, and ways to improve performance and scalability. This live demos shows real-time speed-ups of transactions, queries, and overall performance.
Additionally, this talk explores techniques for monitoring Cloud Spanner to identify performance bottlenecks. Watch now to learn more.
Choose the Right Google Database Service With This Chart
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A growing number of Indian enterprises are leveraging the Google Cloud to run their database workloads.
This is because Google Cloud offers fully managed, scalable database services to support all applications today and tomorrow.
In fact, Forrester has named Google as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Database-as-a-Service, Q2 2019.
The first question many {$persona}s ask is: Which database type is best for my specific workload or use case? Here are two tables that will help you get that answer. Click on the images.
With Google Cloud database services, you can supercharge your applications, accelerate adoption with broad open-source database compatibility, and do more with your data through integrations with analytics and ML/AI.
Daffodil Software Saves Hundreds of Hours Managing Databases with Google Cloud SQL
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Daffodil Software is an India-based information technology services company with 180 employees and satellite offices in the US, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates.
Its product: A suite of web-based applications, including a business customer relationship management (CRM) program and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) app for schools.
Daffodil’s Challenge
Daffodil needed a cloud-based hosting platform for its applications that would save money and time over in-house hosting. The company tried Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) with MySQL to manage the databases that its applications depended on. The potential was there, but building, testing and deploying the applications took too long, and scalability was also an issue.
“The old system provided the option to scale up if many users accessed our applications at the same time, but we had to do this manually,” says Gaurav Sharma, assistant head of Daffodil’s product team.
Soon, Daffodil switched to Google App Engine, which allows businesses to build and host web apps on the same infrastructure that powers Google applications.
Integration with App Engine lets Sharma and his team quickly build, test and deploy applications and allows them to automatically accommodate fluctuations in the number of users so they don’t have to manually manage the system when demand increases.
Although App Engine’s built-in Datastore was useful, they found that they wanted more SQL-like functionality for their data-driven programs.
Google’s Solution
At Google’s suggestion, Daffodil migrated to Cloud SQL three months later to take advantage of the system’s database indexing and dynamic filtering abilities, which speed up data sorting for Daffodil’s end users.
“Using Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL make our applications go live in half the time and have provided us with hassle-free control over all processes.”
—Yogesh Agarwal, CEO, Daffodil Software
Besides indexing and dynamic filtering, Cloud SQL has simplified database management for the Daffodil team. Sharma can easily import their databases and administer them through an intuitive interface, while Google handles backend maintenance and administration.
Google Cloud SQL replicates data among multiple geographic regions, giving Daffodil CEO Yogesh Agarwal peace of mind that users’ data held by the applications is protected.
“The safety of our customers’ data is a major concern, so we appreciate that we don’t need to worry about data loss,” he says.
The Results
With App Engine and Cloud SQL, the Daffodil team is saving about 80 hours of development time every month because of easier deployment, no active management for scaling, and simplified database management. They have also slashed the time it takes to bring new products to market.
“The shift to Google Cloud SQL has allowed us to focus on making our applications even better.”
—Yogesh Agarwal, CEO, Daffodil Software
“Using Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL make our applications go live in half the time and have provided us with hassle-free control over all processes, such as development, deployment and monitoring,” Agarwal says. “We’re able to deploy our applications much faster and spend less time managing them.”
Going forward, the Daffodil team plans to add other Google services to their applications, including Prediction API, which allows CRM application users to better predict the probability of a lead becoming a customer, and App Engine’s Full Text Search API, which helps users retrieve customer data more easily.
Agarwal is happy with the move to App Engine and Cloud SQL. “The shift has allowed us to focus on making our applications even better,” he says.
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Explore the Innovations and Architecture Powering Spanner and BigQuery
Previously, databases had architectures with tightly coupled storage and compute. This resulted in higher latency, and with faster networks these constraints no longer surface. With Google Cloud’s BigQuery and CloudSpanner, the storage and compute architecture have been separated, allowing for better scalability and availability to address businesses’ high throughput data needs.
Watch the video to understand how these database and analysis products leverage Google’s distributed storage system, in-house custom network hardware and software, internal cluster management system and more!
No More ‘Tab Game’ with Easy Tutorials on Google Cloud Console
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When it comes to learning how to implement some technology, we all have our own version of what I call the “tab game”—that is, your setup for all the tabs and windows you need open at once. You may have several monitors so you can see documentation, your IDE, and terminal windows at the same time. You may have several guides and references open at once in one window to get all the information you need.
Personally, I like to work just from my laptop because I like to move around and work from various comfy spots. I think my tab game would probably enrage most devs because it involves a lot of swiping back and forth between windows *and* toggling tabs. It’s not pretty. That is, it wasn’t pretty until I discovered tutorials in the Google Cloud Console!
Jen really didn’t know about tutorials in the Google Cloud Console?
Yes, I honestly didn’t know about them! I’m sharing about it because if I can work for Google and not know, then I can’t be the only one, and it would be a shame to miss out on this because it’s a brilliant idea. Also I wrote some pretty sweet tutorials for the console, but I swear that the main reason I’m telling you is because it’s a cool thing!
There are several reasons that these tutorials are great:
- You can view the instructions and the console at the same time. No more playing the tab game!
- The tutorials include links and highlights, making it easy to find the screens and buttons you’re looking for
- You can run code from Cloud Shell, so you don’t need a separate window for an IDE
- You can use the demo data provided to try things out, or you can apply the steps to your existing projects using data that suits your app’s needs
Firestore tutorials
I’m developing a series of tutorials in the Google Cloud Console designed to take you through everything you need to know about Firestore–from manually adding data in the Google Cloud Console to triggering Cloud Functions to make changes for you. Below are links and summaries for the currently available tutorials. Check back regularly to find the latest additions as they’re released!
- Enable Firestore on a project
- Learn about the Firestore data model
- Add a collection of documents
- Add fields to a document
- Delete documents and collections
Updating Data in Firestore using Node.js or using Python
- Add a collection of documents
- Explore available data types
- Replace the data of document
- Replace fields in a document
- Handle special cases: incrementing, timestamps, and arrays
Reading Data from Firestore using Node.js or using Python
- Add a collection of documents
- Explore available data types
- Read a collection
- Read a single document
- Order documents
- Query documents
Transactions in Firestore using Node.js
- Add a collection of documents
- Update data without a transaction to observe issue
- Complete a transaction
- Complete a batched write
Batched Writes in Firestore using Node.js or using Python
- Use Cloud Shell and Cloud Shell Editor to write a Node.js or Python app
- Complete a batched write
Firestore triggers for Cloud Functions
- Initialize Cloud Functions using the Firebase CLI
- Write a Cloud Function triggered by a new document write to Firestore
- Add data to Firestore in the Cloud console Firestore dashboard
- Create a web app that uses Firestore using the Firebase SDK
- Deploy Firestore security rules that enable access to the required data
- Enable data persistence in the web app
- Observe app behavior with and without network connection
Chime in
Is there a particular action or concept in Firestore that you’d like to see a tutorial for? Is there another Google Cloud product that you want to learn more about? Tweet @ThatJenPerson and you may just see your suggestion come to life in the Google Cloud Console!
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