Is the internet really that convenient?

Buying goods on the internet was once purely about paying a lesser price than when purchasing the same items from a shop on the high street.

Plenty of research has since shown that this is no longer the case and the primary reason that consumers buy online is because it is convenient. Yes, it’s so much easier to browse on your mobile or tablet and then await the seamless delivery to the home than it is to traipse down to the shop only to find that they haven’t got the size you want in stock.

This is all true and there is no doubt that buying online has taken some of the leg-work out of shopping. But it has also added in a lot of effort too. At a presentation a short while back from a Google exec some startling facts were revealed.

For starters – did you know that customer shopping journeys have become so complicated that they take seven-times longer than was the case 10 years ago.

In an age of multi-channel journeys, price comparisons, and the proliferation of tablet devices a great deal of time and complexity has been added into the shopping journey. Secondly, can you believe that the average journey for buying clothes now takes a staggering 27 days!

And, apparently, this includes six separate searches and the visiting of seven websites. This will no doubt be elongated by great deliberation and multiple viewings of the items under investigation.

Although many people would classify much of this exercise as extending the enjoyable ‘leisure’ activity that is shopping, it seems that for many people the experience of buying goods on the internet has got a whole lot more inconvenient.

And this does not even include the issue online shoppers continue to face with the last-mile delivery of goods. That really is another wholly inconvenient story.