Through the process of boomerooming products are researched online, seen in the flesh in-store and then bought online for the lowest price possible.
First came showrooming, which means examining items in-store and price shopping online, and then came webrooming (researching online and buying in-store).
UK-based e-commerce Agency, RedSnapper, has recently uncovered a new trend in online consumer behaviour – Boomerooming.
Boomerooming is the process of researching products online, visiting a physical store to see/feel/touch/try a product in the flesh and find the best deals online before making the final purchase.
Showrooming has been a cause for concern for bricks and mortar retailers for several years, until a study was released by Merchant Warehouse earlier this year, revealing that 69% of smartphone users had webroomed, compared to just 50% claiming they had showroomed – a much-welcomed sigh of relief for offline retailers.
RedSnapper took Merchant Warehouse’s research one step further to identify whether consumers were actually using a combination of webrooming and showrooming in a practice they aptly dubbed, ‘Boomerooming’.
The research found that 62% of UK consumers had in fact boomeroomed, which debunks the idea that the ‘physical store experience’ and convenience prevails over a bargain-priced product.
The research looked into what consumers’ main gripes with shopping online are, and the overwhelming majority stated that not being able to see/touch/try a product in the flesh was the main issue.
Photo: “Application for online shoppers” by Dressformer – Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons –
