Increase your patience, retailers! Online Shopping is becoming Online Browsing

Which would you believe is true when a customer comes to your website - the customer sees what they want, then go ahead to purchase? Or that the customer visits several times?

If you said the latter, you get a gold star.  Recent Google posts indicate that more customers are delaying their online purchase, and browsing. This has increased the number of days between first arriving on a site and making a conversion (in this case purchase).

You can see a bar graph of the average number of browsing days by product category on the Google Retail Advertising blog.  This data is based on the 2009 holiday shopping season.  Electronics, home appliances, and home furnishings had the longer average number of browsing days (16 days), while beauty items, gift cards, and pet supplies had the shortest periods (7 days).

The data also confirms what many analytics folks have said for a long time --

• Your traffic does not immediately purchase when they arrive on your site.
• Your traffic is not monolithic - they come for different reasons. In this case cited, there's browsing as well as taking action
• Your analytics is important for understanding the site behavior
• You have an opportunity to provide content that would inform your visitors and potentially encourage conversion

Have you and your marketing team seen a difference in website performance from more browsing at your site? What do you feel lead to more "browsing"? Or is it just client and customer behavior that was inevitable? Feel free to share your insights...