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They want it fast, and with as much information as possible, a new study by SheSpot has found.

SheSpot surveyed 5435 Australian women and found that 90% of them shop online, and 93% research products online. This is nothing new, and at this stage I think we can all accept that the Internet is a great place to sell. What is so interesting about this study, however, is what they discovered about the motives of these female shoppers.

As we can see here, online shopping is perceived by many to be more convenient and efficient than offline. (I’m taking “I don’t have to leave the house” as another point for convenience).

At least 63% of female shoppers go online with the specific purpose of getting their shopping done quicker – so, as online marketers, what can we take from this?

Your web site needs to be:

1) Accessible – Compatible with mobile handsets and tablets, both Android and Apple, as well as all popular web browsers (yes, even IE6 – unless your target market is restricted to people with high IQ’s)

2) Fast – Think about how long it takes to load a page on a slow (likely mobile) broadband connection, as well as how long it takes for a customer to get through the transaction process. I think a a good target is to try and make it so the customer can buy the product faster online than if they were to come into the shop itself.

In all things the goal is to make it as easy as possible for your prospects to buy from you, which leads me to the other interesting finding of the study:

“Tablets and mobile screens currently account for 21% of time spent online but this is expected to jump to 28% next year.”

There are two very important statistics to acknowledge here:

1) Use of smartphones to locate the nearest store
2) Increasing popularity in barcode scanning apps

As I said in my previous post on smartphone marketing, mobile marketing has really begun to take off this year. The best bit of advice I can give is to make sure that, everytime someone searches the locality on their mobile device, you’re there. This means local directories, Google Places and your address printed in the footer of our website.

A summary of the report by SheSpot is available here, and you can email them to get a full copy.