SMBs Can Boost Sales by Closing the Shopping Feature ‘Usage Gap’

When shopping with small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the shopping features consumers care about most are rewards programs and the ability to use their preferred payment method.

Double-digit shares of SMB customers cited those shopping features as the most important for businesses to offer, with 13% citing rewards and 12% citing their preferred payment methods, according to “The 2022 Digital Shopping Index: SMB Edition,” a PYMNTS and Cybersource collaboration that examined the behaviors of 13,114 consumers and 3,100 merchants.

Get the report: The 2022 Digital Shopping Index

The next most cited shopping features were free shipping (7%), data protection (6%) and cross-channel digital profile availability (5%).

In some cases, there was a “usage gap” between the share of SMBs that offered select shopping features and the share of consumers who used those features.

Among the features that SMB customers did not realize local SMBs provided were voice and profiles among different channels. With each of these features, the share of SMBs providing them was greater than the share of consumers who were aware of them.

Among the features that SMB customers were more likely to use than SMBs were to support were preferred payment methods, product details and disputes. In each of these cases, the share of consumers aware of these shopping features was greater than the share of SMBs offering them.

These usage gaps strongly suggested two things.

First, SMB customers were shopping far more with the local SMBs that provided the features they wanted than with local SMBs that were not. This underscored how important it is for SMBs to support the shopping features that local shoppers want to use.

Second, it highlighted how important it is that SMBs ensure their customers realize that those features are available.