Danemco Monthly Newsletter

Table Of Contents

Quilter's Shopping Habbits

Cool Tip: Browser Wars

Make Danemco Better

Education: Learning From Quilter's Shopping Habbits

Average Online Spending

Survey respondents claimed to spend an average of $616.70 per year on quilting-related purchases online. They spend a little more online compared to $587.29 per year in traditional brick-and-mortar stores.

There was a wide range of spending. The standard variation for online spending was $492.44.

On average, quilters who shop online spend about as much as they do in a store. The graph below illustrates this.

Comparing In-Store vs Online Prices

Seventy-seven percent of survey respondents said that they actively compare the prices of what they see in the store with what they can find online.

Which Search Engines Quilters Use To Find Products

When asked what search engines quilters use to find products online, most stated they used popular Internet search engines, such as Google and Yahoo. However, a significant number of quilters use niche search engines as well.

What Quilters Buy The Most and Least Of Online

Quilters that shop online were asked what they buy the most and least of online. Fabric is by far the most popular category. The least popular category is Sewing Machines. Blue indicates what quilters buy the most of online. Red represents what quilters buy the least of online.

Online Store Loyalty

To test an online shopper's loyalty to a particular store, survey participants were asked how likely they were to try a new online store every time they sat down to make an online purchase. Survey takers responded on a scale of one to five. A five meant they rarely shop outside of the online stores they have purchased from before. A one meant they're not loyal to any particular store and begin their search for products afresh every time.

The average response was a 3.3, meaning quilters tend to be somewhat loyal to the online stores they like. Quilters check the online stores they like first, but are also willing to look elsewhere for the products they're after.

Important Factors in Choosing an Online Store

Survey takers were asked if more than one online store carried the same product, what would be the most important factor in determining from which store to make the purchase. Although prices are important, you may be surprised that the most popular answer for Most Important and Second Most Important was Favorable Shipping Prices. Second to that was discounted products. Thirdly, customers thought good customer service was an important factor in choosing which store to buy from.

Biggest Deterrent to Shopping at an Online Store

Along with initial attraction to an online store, survey participants were asked what are the biggest deterrent to shopping at an online store. Cluttered or hard to follow website navigation was at the top of the list.

Online Social Network Use

Aside from blogs, survey respondents said they use Facebook, Yahoo! Groups, and Webshots the most to share network and share with others.

Age of Online Shoppers

Ninety-nine percent of survey participants were females. The graph below shows their ages. The most popular age group of online quilting supply shoppers is the 45 to 55 age bracket.

Text Messaging and Smart Phones

In general, 58% of the quilters surveyed send text messages from their cell phones. Of those that do text messaging, most text message once a day. Only twenty-five percent of those surveyed have a smart phone, with Blackberry phones being the most popular at 62%.

Key Findings

• Little or no shipping prices is more important that the product's price
• Mobile commerce is still very new for this demographic
• Quilters tend to be loyal to the online stores they have shopped at before
• A cluttered, hard to follow website will drive shoppers away more than any other factor
• Fabric is by far the #1 most shopped category on the web

Cool Tip: Understand Browsers, Understand Your Visitors

Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... the war of the web browsers began, and still continues today!  Simply put, a web browser is the program that you use to surf the web.  It interprets web page code and loads the information on your screen.  Popular web browser programs include Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Konqueror, Opera, and Google Chrome.  There are literally hundreds of web browsers out there.

Each web browser displays websites slightly differently, because it's up to each program to interpret the web page code to display it on the screen.  Although modern browsers agree on many of the important web page code interpretations, once in a while a website will look different on your computer.  From a web developer's point of view, the web browser software that has the biggest problems is Internet Explorer version 6.  It displays and interprets web pages very differently from the others.  My personal favorite web browser is Mozilla Firefox.

One neat online program that helps you see the differences of web browsers is called BrowserLab by Adobe (http://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html).  After creating a free account, you can view any website in a few browsers.  You can even see them side by side.

Understanding how your website looks on the web in different browsers is your web designer's job.  But understanding that websites look differently helps you understand your customers better.  For instance, if you get a call from someone saying they have a big gray spot at the top of your site, but you don't see it, it could be related to a different browser interpreting things differently.  You can recommend they try a different browser until your web developer fixes the problem.

Below is a table of browsers popularity as of April 2010.  This information comes from w3cschools.com.  IE means Microsoft Internet Explorer. 

How Are We Doing?

How is Danemco doing?  How is our level of service and quality of our products?  I maintain a list of ways to improve how our products work, subjects for future newsletters, and ways to improve our service to you.  If you have any ideas of how to improve the way Danemco operates, please let me know.  If you have any questions about the Web, E-commerce, or other topics that may be good for a future newsletter, please send me a note.  Please call or e-mail your suggestions to my e-mail address and include “Make Danemco Better” in the subject.

We sincerely consider all suggestions as opportunities to improve and serve you better.

Thank you for reading. Please forward to a friend.

Dan Purcell

If you wish to reprint the Education portion of this newsletter, authorization is hereby granted as long as the source is clearly cited as follows: < Reprinted with permission from Dan Purcell, Danemco LLC. www.danemcoweb.com and www.websitesforquilters.com >

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