Retailers struggle to identify site visitors

Even established online retailers face significant competition from large discount marketplaces like Temu, Rakuten and, of course, Amazon. That makes it even more disturbing that they are only successfully identifying 15 to 27% of their site visitors, leaving up to 85% unknown.

The statistics come from Bluecore’s “2024 Benchmark Report.” The problem here is illustrated by another statistic from the same source. Knowing your visitors makes it more likely that they will buy again. Businesses with the highest ID rates see 53% higher repeat purchases.

Why we care. It’s harder for retailers, isn’t it? When it comes to complex purchases like cars or houses, and indeed to B2B transactions, the purchaser will identify themselves at some point in the journey, even if it’s later than the seller would like. Ecommerce retailers will collect transaction data at the point of conversion, but will they recognize that buyer when they reappear?

The task is to take identifiers like email addresses or phone numbers and “match them to previously collected behavior,” Bluecore says. There is no simple answer to what constitutes a good identification rate; the higher the better, it seems. The full report can be found here.

More angles on buyer behavior. Here are some other data points from the report:

• Purchasers of apparel are apparently more transparent about their identities than purchasers in other spaces. Twenty-seven percent is the identification rate for apparel buyers, associated with a one-year repeat purchase rate of 20%.
• No verticals reached reactivation rates of 10% or higher, even though reactivated customers spend more than new ones.
• Long-term retention is also a problem with as little as 6% of customers continuing to purchase after the three-year mark is reached. This is a dramatic drop off from the 78% of customers who make a repeat purchase within the first year.