Retail has spent years improving the mechanics of shopping. Delivery windows have shrunk from days to hours. Search tools surface relevant products almost immediately. Recommendation engines remember previous purchases, while AI is beginning to answer product questions before shoppers even reach a retailer’s website. Those developments have changed consumer expectations because they save time and remove many of the practical barriers that once slowed shopping down.
When our team reviewed the findings from Alter Agents’ latest consumer research, one result kept coming back into the conversation. We almost removed this question from the survey because the results had been remarkably consistent for years, and I wasn’t sure it was telling us anything new. I’m glad we left it in. This year, fewer Americans described shopping as easy than when we first asked the question in 2019, while four in 10 said they had left a retailer’s website because the number of choices became overwhelming. Shopping has become dramatically faster over the past decade, so we expected consumers to tell us it was getting easier too. Instead, we found ourselves asking a different question: why doesn’t shopping feel easier despite everything retailers have done to simplify it?
Discovery Keeps Expanding
Years ago, Alter Agents began tracking the number of information sources shoppers consulted before making a purchase. For a long time, watching that number grow felt like good news. I still remember hearing a podcast recommendation for a countertop composting device that turned food scraps into soil. I probably never would have discovered it otherwise. That’s what made this shift so exciting. Podcasts, search engines, retailer websites, reviews and social media gave consumers new ways to discover products they might never have encountered on their own.
As we continue studying shopper behavior, the number of sources keeps growing. Even in categories such as coffee or household cleaning products, shoppers regularly consult a dozen or more sources before buying, while more considered purchases involve many more. For years, that trend looked entirely positive. More information meant consumers could make better-informed decisions and brands had more opportunities to be discovered.
What has changed over time is not simply the number of places consumers can look. Shoppers have become skilled researchers. They know where to go depending on the question they need answered. Search engines help them learn about a category, reviews provide real-world experiences, videos demonstrate how a product works, retailer sites help compare options, and coupons or retailer apps often come into play much closer to purchase. Different sources support different decisions, and consumers move between them with surprising speed.
Today’s shopper may move between search results, retailer websites, creator videos, AI tools and review sites before making a purchase. Each source serves a different purpose, but each one also introduces another judgment. Reviews are weighed against expert opinions, creator recommendations are compared with retailer information and AI-generated summaries become one more input rather than the final answer. The same information that once made shopping feel exciting now asks consumers to evaluate one more opinion, one more recommendation or one more review before deciding they’re ready to buy.
Effort Deserves its Own Metric
Retail measures operational performance exceptionally well. Teams know how quickly products ship, how shoppers move through a website and which recommendations generate clicks. Those measures explain how commerce is functioning, and they have helped retailers deliver faster, smoother experiences over time. They reveal much less about what shoppers are thinking as they compare products or what finally convinces them to make a decision.
The shopping experience can look identical in the data while representing two very different experiences for consumers. Two shoppers may spend the same amount of time on a product page. One may have found exactly what they needed and simply be reading specifications. The other may be comparing dozens of similar products without feeling any closer to a decision. The analytics look almost identical, but the reasons behind those behaviors are completely different.
That is where consumer research becomes useful. Transaction data can tell a retailer that someone abandoned a cart or spent five minutes on a product page. It can’t explain whether they were comparing similar products, looking for independent validation or trying to answer one last question before making a purchase. Shopper journey studies, brand tracking and quantitative research help fill in those gaps by showing how consumers move between information sources, which sources influence decisions at different stages and where the purchase process begins to slow. Those findings help explain patterns that behavioral data alone can’t fully capture.
Where Retailers can Help
That gives retailers a useful question to explore. Where do shoppers actually begin to struggle? Is it the assortment, the product information, the reviews or something else entirely? The answer will vary by category, which is exactly why it needs to be measured rather than assumed. Consumer research can identify where product comparisons become difficult, where shoppers leave to verify information somewhere else and where seemingly small changes make decisions easier.
Retailers have spent years improving speed, personalization and convenience, and consumers clearly value those investments. The next opportunity is understanding how people actually make decisions in an environment where information is abundant and every purchase draws from multiple sources. Retailers that understand how decisions unfold across those sources, where shoppers hesitate and which information genuinely helps them move forward will be better equipped to create shopping experiences that feel easier as well as faster.
About the author: Devora Rogers is Chief Strategy Officer at Alter Agents where she leads executive client partnership, consultative insights and strategy. Strategy has been Devora’s passion for more than a decade. She has led research teams, developed the methodology deployed for Google’s groundbreaking ZMOT research, launched global offices, and worked with dozens of global brands including Gatorade, Nespresso, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Fortune Brands, among others.
