The Weekly Shop is back with our round up of the latest news, articles and advice from the digital marketing and online retail realms. This week, ‘showrooming’, a new generation of ‘visual shoppers’ and some SEO myth-busting, as well as a tool that allows you to search every tweet ever published!

Can web technology help save the high street?

Last week, Bill Grimsey presented his ‘Alternative Future for the High Street’ report to ministers and business leaders in parliament. This article from Econsultancy focuses on how web based technology can help revive the high street and how businesses need to adapt to changes in consumer behaviour. Our Commercial Director, Ben, also wrote about this subject for Econsultancy back in April when the High Street Forum launched.

One in 10 shoppers has bought from a retail website while standing in another retailer’s store: study
Talking of changes in consumer behaviour, one of the major challenges faced by high street retailers is ‘showrooming’. Mobile technology means that consumers are actively checking competitor prices and reading reviews whilst in store. This study reveals that one in 10 shoppers have actually gone on to buy a product via their mobile device…whilst in store.  An article we featured last week looks into the psychology of showrooming and what retailers can do to respond.

Urban Outfitters uses fans’ social pics to sell clothes

Urban Outfitters is utilising user-generated content in a rather interesting way.  Using a social commerce platform called Fanreel, they are pulling in images of their fans wearing Urban Outfitters clobber from Facebook and Instagram. They plan to introduce these images on their product pages in the coming months. That’ll certainly save on models and studio photography!

In all seriousness though, it’s a great idea- who better to model Urban Outfitters clothing than their uber-cool customers (or ‘upscale homeless persons’ as their CEO, Richard Hayne, describes them!).

New generation of visual shoppers reveals that text based search is no longer enough
According to a study by WeSEE, shoppers aged 18 to 34 make up a new ‘visual generation’ for whom images regularly inspire purchases. 40% of under 35s say they have used their mobile device to take a picture of a specific item on the high street to buy once they get home and three-quarters of 18-34 year-olds saying they’d like more visual technologies incorporated into online and mobile shopping.

The study also found that three-quarters (74%) of UK consumers say that traditional text-based keyword queries and ads are inefficient in helping them find the right items online. This may explain why we are finding Google Product Listing Ads (image based) to be performing so strongly, especially in sectors such as fashion.

How Search Engines Work — Really!
The first of two SEO related articles aimed at busting a few myths! Have you ever wondered how a search engine like Google actually works or what the difference is between crawling and indexing?  Understanding how search engines work helps provide some context to the recommendations made by your web developers or SEO partner. This useful article from Search Engine Land explains all.

Three Awful Things That People Actually Think Are True about SEO
More SEO myth busting. Optimising anchor text and the length of time it takes to gain first page rankings are discussed in this article from Search Engine Journal.

Topsy Becomes Definitive Twitter Search Engine
Interested in searching all the tweets that have ever been published? Look no further than Topsy, which has 540 billion tweets in its index!  More over at Search Engine Land.

Until next week, happy reading.