Digiday Research: Publisher commerce strategies suffer from lack of loyalty

Publishers have good reason to encourage shopper loyalty. Research from Stitch Labs found that repeat shoppers spend more than double what first-time shoppers do. To that end, PopSugar is developing a text-based system to turn readers into repeat shoppers by encouraging its mobile audience to make impulse purchases.

Despite the importance publishers place on building shopper loyalty, getting consumers to make a second purchase is challenging. Sixty-two percent of the publishers in Digiday’s survey reported that less than 25 percent of their customers were repeat shoppers. But the opportunities for publishers to have repeat shoppers are limited, given the newness of some of their commerce operations.

Bleacher Report, for instance, sold out of sweatshirts featuring NBA player Carmelo Anthony almost instantly in its commerce test. Similarly, Highsnobiety sold an array of products to mark its 10-year anniversary and was inundated with 16,000 people trying to make purchases within two hours. It has since shifted to an affiliate sales model.

There are diminishing returns for high-cost products like BuzzFeed’s $149 Tasty One Top or Tastemade’s $180 skillet. As the 14 percent of publishers that have turned at least 75 percent of their audiences into returning customers shows, publishers should be able to grow their number of repeat customers as they expand their branded product offerings beyond one-off sales, develop full-fledged online stores like The New York Times and promote their commerce operations.