Online Shopping vs. the Specialty Store

Do Americans prefer to shift through online reviews and schedule home deliveries or would they rather trek it to a brick-and-mortar specialty store and chat with the knowledgeable sales staff? In 2022, there are still fans of both approaches to finding the perfect product. Some types of articles are less likely to be purchased from specialty stores in 2022, however.

According to the Statista Global Consumer Survey, more than a third of Americans now prefer to purchase clothing online. Being a product that everyone needs and many habitually purchase, clothing stores still have lots of customers left, with almost 60 percent of Americans saying they had purchased something from one in the past 12 months.

Other specialty stores are not doing so well as customers turn to the internet and to department stores, where half of Americans were customers in 2022. Only 22 percent of Americans said they had purchased something from a book store in the past year, while books were among the types of media that 31 percent of Americans now prefer to buy online.

Two product categories with significant offline advantages were drugstore and health products as well as DIY and garden items. For the former, brick-and-mortar customers outnumbered habitual online purchasers by 20 percentage points. This made drugstores and perfumeries the most common physical business Americans are still customers of behind pharmacies, department stores and clothing stores. Supermarkets were not included in the survey.