Web Shoppers Still Browse in Traditional Stores

From the Associated Press:

Don't call brick-and-mortar retail stores irrelevant in this age of e-commerce: In a survey, 69% of U.S. online shoppers admit to browsing in traditional stores before buying over the Internet. That's an increase from 53% in a similar study in 2000.

Two-thirds of online shoppers say they now buy over the Internet some of the things they used to get in store visits. Yet the percentage getting information or shopping online prior to visiting a regular store remains steady at 75%. "We do see more and more displacement from retail stores, … but it's absolutely not the death of the retail store," said Jeff Cole, who directed the study at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for the Digital Future.

Americans remain concerned about the privacy of personal information when they shop online, but the intensity of such concerns has decreased. Those "very" or "extremely" concerned decreased, while the "somewhat" concerned group jumped. The study, the fourth in an annual series conducted until this year at the University of California Los Angeles, was based on random telephone interviews with 2,009 households from July to September 2003. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

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