Majority still prefer shopping in-store to online

JOHANNESBURG: South Africans still prefer physical shops as opposed to buying goods online, according to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers survey released yesterday.

In 2014, the value of online retail sales in South Africa was R5.3 billion, retail and consumer leader John Wilkinson said. “That is tiny. That is not even 1 percent of total retail sales in this country.”

However, the value of online retail sales was projected to rise to R9.5bn in 2018.

According to the survey, 14 percent of respondents said they shopped online weekly or more regularly. A total of 53 percent said they intentionally browsed products at a shop, then purchased them online. A total of 73 percent said they browsed products online, then bought them in-store.

Regarding reasons why people bought products online, 57 percent said it was because they could shop 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while 50 percent said there was no need to travel to a physical store. A total of 40 percent said it was easier to compare and research products or offers instore, and 36 percent preferred online shopping because they could get lower prices and better deals than in-store.

Twenty percent said they preferred online because they could look for a particular brand or product. “It really echoed the results of the work we did last year with this survey,” Wilkinson said. “Retailers need to think beyond channels because we find that consumers are channel agnostic and want to be connected to their retailers 24/7.”

The physical store was still the main touch point in South Africa, but would become increasingly important, especially with cellphones allowing retailers to interact with customers regularly.

More than half of South African shoppers, 59 percent, have researched products on their phones, while 63 percent have used them for price comparisons.

As a payment method, cellphones were used only 9 percent of the time. Forty-eight percent of respondents said they were wary of having their credit card information stolen if they used a cellphone to pay.

Kalahari.net and Woolworths had the biggest share of the online shopping market in 2014 at 6.6 percent each. – Sapa

Consumers want to be connected to retailers 24/7