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Four back-to-school and off-to-college consumer trends retailers should know

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.1. 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 LearnWhat 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 HelpGoogle-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 reportfrom Quantum Metric.Sources:1. Back-to-School Retail Benchmarks reportfrom Quantum Metric2. Google/Ipsos,Moments 2021, Jun 2021, Online survey, US, n=335 Back to School shoppers3. 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 days5. 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”Related ArticleQuantum Metric explores retail big data use cases on BigQueryExplore three ways enterprises are leveraging Quantum Metric data in BigQuery to enhance the customer experience.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Google Cloud Data Heroes Series: Meet Francisco, the Ecuadorian American founder of Direcly, a Google Cloud Partner

Google Cloud Data Heroes is a series where we share stories of the everyday heroes who use our data analytics tools to do incredible things. Like any good superhero tale, we explore our Google Cloud Data Heroes’ origin stories, how they moved from data chaos to a data-driven environment, what projects and challenges they are overcoming now, and how they give back to the community.In this month’s edition, we’re pleased to introduce Francisco! He is based out of Austin, Texas, but you’ll often find him in Miami, Mexico City, or Bogotá, Colombia. Francisco is the founder of Direcly, a Google Marketing Platform and Google Cloud Consulting/Sales Partner with presence in the US and Latin America.Francisco was born in Quito, Ecuador, and at age 13, came to the US to live with his father in Miami, Florida. He studied Marketing at Saint Thomas University, and his skills in math landed him a job as Teaching Assistant for Statistics & Calculus. After graduation, his professional career began at some nation’s  leading ad agencies before he eventually transitioned into the ad tech space. In 2016, he ventured into the entrepreneurial world and founded Direcly, a Google Marketing Platform, Google Cloud, and Looker Sales/Consulting partner obsessed with using innovative technological solutions to solve business challenges. Against many odds and with no external funding since its inception, Direcly became a part of a selected group of Google Cloud and Google Marketing Platform partners. Francisco’s story was even featured in a Forbes Ecuador article! Outside of the office, Francisco is an avid comic book reader/collector, a golfer, and fantasy adventure book reader. His favorite comic book is The Amazing Spider-Man #252, and his favorite book is The Hobbit. He says he isn’t the best golfer, but can ride the cart like a pro.When were you introduced to the cloud, tech, or data field? What made you pursue this in your career? I began my career in marketing/advertising, and I was quickly drawn to the tech/data space, seeing the critical role it played. I’ve always been fascinated by technology and how fast it evolves. My skills in math and tech ended up being a good combination. I began learning some open source solutions like Hadoop, Spark, and MySQL for fun and started to apply them in roles I had throughout my career.  After my time in the ad agency world, I transitioned into the ad tech industry, where I was introduced to how cloud solutions were powering ad tech solutions like demand side, data management, and supply side platforms. I’m the type of person that can get easily bored doing the same thing day in and day out, so I pursued a career in data/tech because it’s always evolving. As a result, it forces you to evolve with it. I love the feeling of starting something from scratch and slowly mastering a skill.What courses, studies, degrees, or certifications were instrumental to your progression and success in the field? In your opinion, what data skills or competencies should data practitioners be focusing on acquiring to be successful in 2022 and why? My foundation in math, calculus, and statistics was instrumental for me.  Learning at my own pace and getting to know the open source solutions was a plus. What I love about Google is that it provides you with an abundance of resources and information to get started, become proficient, and master skills. Coursera is a great place to get familiar with Google Cloud and prepare for certifications. Quests in Qwiklabs are probably one of my favorite ways of learning because you actually have to put in the work and experience first hand what it’s like to use Google Cloud solutions. Lastly, I would also say that just going to the Google Cloud internal documentation and spending some time reading and getting familiar with all the use cases can make a huge difference. For those who want to acquire the right skills I would suggest starting with the fundamentals. Before jumping into Google Cloud, make sure you have a good understanding of Python, SQL, data, and some popular open sources. From there, start mastering Google Cloud by firstly learning the fundamentals and then putting things into practice with Labs. Obtain a professional certification — it can be quite challenging but it is rewarding once you’ve earned it. If possible, add more dimension to your data expertise by studying real life applications with an industry that you are passionate about. I am fortunate to be a Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer and hold certifications in Looker, Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Display and Video 360, Campaign Manager 360, Search Ads 360, and Google Ads. I am also currently working to obtain my Google Cloud Machine Learning Engineer Certification. Combining data applications with analytics and marketing has proven instrumental throughout my career. The ultimate skill is not knowledge or competency in a specific topic, but the ability to have a varied range of abilities and views in order to solve complicated challenges.You’re no doubt a thought leader in the field. What drew you to Google Cloud? How have you given back to your community with your Google Cloud learnings?Google Cloud solutions are highly distributed, allowing companies to use the same resources an organization like Google uses internally, but for their own business needs. With Google being a clear leader in the analytics/marketing space, the possibilities and applications are endless. As a Google Marketing Platform Partner and having worked with the various ad tech stacks Google has to offer, merging Google Cloud and GMP for disruptive outcomes and solutions is really exciting.  I consider myself to be a very fortunate person, who came from a developing country, and was given amazing opportunities from both an educational and career standpoint. I have always wanted to give back in the form of teaching and creating opportunities, especially for Latinos / US Hispanics. Since 2018, I’ve partnered with Florida International University Honors College and Google to create industry relevant courses. I’ve had the privilege to co-create the curriculum and teach on quite a variety of topics. We introduced a class called Marketing for the 21st Century, which had a heavy emphasis on the Google Marketing Platform. Given its success, in 2020, we introduced Analytics for the 21st Century, where we incorporated key components of Google Cloud into the curriculum. Students were even fortunate enough to learn from Googlers like Rob Milks (Data Analytics Specialist) and Carlos Augusto (Customer Engineer).What are 1-2 of your favorite projects you’ve done with Google Cloud’s data products? My favorite project to date is the work we have done with Royal Caribbean International (RCI) and Roar Media. Back in 2018, we were able to transition RCI efforts from a fragmented ad tech stack into a consolidated one within the Google Marketing Platform. Moreover, we were able to centralize attribution across all the paid marketing channels. With the vast amount of data we were capturing (17+ markets), it was only logical to leverage Google Cloud solutions in the next step of our journey. We centralized all data sources in the warehouse and deployed business intelligence across business units. The biggest challenge from the start was designing an architecture that would meet both business and technical requirements. We had to consider the best way to ingest data from several different sources, unify them, have the ability to transform data as needed, visualize it for decision makers, and set the foundations to apply machine learning. Having a deep expertise in marketing/analytics platforms combined with an understanding of data engineering helped me tremendously in leading the process, designing/implementing the ideal architecture, and being able to present end users with information that makes a difference in their daily jobs.      We utilized BigQuery as a centralized data warehouse to integrate all marketing sources (paid, organic, and research) though custom built pipelines. From there we created data driven dashboards within Looker, de-centralizing data and giving end users the ability to explore and answer key questions and make real time data driven business decisions. An evolution of this initiative has been able to go beyond marketing data and apply machine learning. We have created dashboards that look into covid trends, competitive pricing, SEO optimizations, and data feeds for dynamic ads. From the ML aspect, we have created predictive models on the revenue side, mixed marketing modeling, and applied machine learning to translate English language ads to over 17 languages leveraging historical data.What are your favoriteGoogle Cloud data productswithin the data analytics, databases, and/or AI/ML categories? What use case(s) do you most focus on in your work? What stands out aboutGoogle Cloud’s offerings?I am a big fan of BigQuery (BQ) and Looker. Traditional data warehouses are no match for the cloud – they’re not built to accommodate the exponential growth of today’s data and the sophisticated analytics required. BQ offers a fast, highly scalable, cost-effective and fully controlled cloud data warehouse for integrated machine learning analytics and the implementation of AI. Looker on the other hand, is truly next generation BI. We all love Structured Query Language (SQL), but I think many of us have been in position of writing dense queries and forgetting how some aspects of the code work, experiencing the limited collaboration options, knowing that people write queries in different ways, and how difficult it can be to track changes in a query if you changed your mind on a measure. I love how Look ML solves all those challenges, and how it helps one reuse, control and separate SQL into building blocks. Not to mention, how easy it is to give end users with limited technical knowledge the ability to look at data on their terms.      What’s next for you?I am really excited about everything we are doing at Direcly. We have come a long way, and I’m optimistic that we can go even further. Next for me is just to keep on working with a group of incredibly bright people who are obsessed with using innovative technological solutions to solve business challenges faced by other incredibly bright people.From this story I would like to tell those that are pursuing a dream, that are looking to provide a better life for themselves and their loved ones, to do it, take risks, never stop learning, and put in the work. Things may or may not go your way, but keep persevering — you’ll be surprised with how it becomes more about the journey than the destination. And whether things don’t go as planned, or you have a lot of success, you will remember everything you’ve been through and how far you’ve come from where you started.  Want to join the Data Engineer Community?Register for the Data Engineer Spotlight, where attendees have the chance to learn from four technical how-to sessions and hear from Google Cloud Experts on the latest product innovations that can help you manage your growing data.Related ArticleGoogle Cloud Data Heroes Series: Meet Antonio, a Data Engineer from Lima, PeruGoogle Cloud continues their Data Hero series with a profile on Antonio C., a data engineer, teacher, writer, and enthusiast on GCP.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform