eMarketer looks at how affluent consumers are enthusiastically buying high-end apparel online.
Home electronics and books usually appear well ahead of apparel on lists of the most frequently purchased online product categories, but affluent Americans tend to be more comfortable than the average internet user in purchasing apparel online. In a TIME Magazine-sponsored poll of U.S. online adults with annual household income of at least $150,000, affluent consumers ranked apparel and books as the leading product categories purchased during the 12-month period prior to January 2006.
According to the TIME survey, affluent Americans also said that clothing brands (40 percent) and good prices (36 percent) were, by far, the two most important factors influencing their choice of a web retailer. Clothing is the most frequent type of apparel purchased by affluent online consumers. Even more striking is the fact that among affluent Americans, women show a greater willingness to buy expensive clothing (such as dresses costing several thousand dollars) online at full price, despite not being able to try them on first. As Michael Crotty, SVP, marketing, Bergdorf Goodman, noted, "We've had little to no price resistance on merchandise on the web."
Some 12 percent of affluent online shoppers said the internet is their primary destination for apparel shopping, according to TIME. Another 18 percent picked the internet as their second-favorite place to shop for apparel, for a combined total of 30 percent ranking the internet as one of their top two choices for apparel shopping.
Only 4 percent of affluent consumers use the internet as their primary source to get most of their ideas for new clothing and accessories, compared to 36 percent who browse at stores, according to the TIME survey. However, some of these offline browsers are converting to online buyers.
Take the case of shoppers who get most of their ideas from seeing what other people wear (47 percent in total). An increasing number of celebrity watchers are discovering that they can easily buy online the outfits worn by their favorite movie and TV stars. The ABC TV website, for example, allows customers to shop for outfits worn by characters on their favorite shows such as "Desperate Housewives."
Jeffrey Grau is a senior analyst at eMarketer. This article is drawn from the recent eMarketer report, US Retail E-Commerce. Marketer is the "first place to look" for market research information related to the internet, ebusiness, and online marketing. To email eMarketer, click here.