Post-Pandemic Shifts in Consumer Shopping Habits: Authenticity, Personalization and the Power of UGC

After over a year of stay-at-home orders and social distancing due to COVID-19, the way consumers around the world shop and interact with brands has forever changed.

The already-growing consumer shift towards eCommerce accelerated, while in-person social activities massively moved to video chats and social media platforms. In the last year, online shopping and the average time spent on social networks reached all-time highs.

With more product inspiration and shopping taking place online, brands are now competing for attention in an endless sea of digital ads and eCommerce stores. But are these new consumer habits here to stay? And how will they impact long-term online shopping trends?

After surveying 2,042 consumers across the U.S., UK and Australia, it’s clear that consumers crave more personalized and authentic shopping experiences. Not only are pandemic shopping and social trends here to stay, but they are also making real and relevant content—like user-generated content (UGC)—more important than ever for brands to leverage.

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Post-Pandemic Shifts in Consumer Shopping Habits: Authenticity, Personalization and the Power of UGC

“Using Nosto, we are able to adapt our product recommendations to every individual behavior and sync with our custom audience segments to create truly unique experiences. The customers who interacted with Nosto’s recommendations had a conversion rate 3.5x and an average visit value 3.8x those who didn’t, and our average order value increased by 10%.”

Matthieu Galtié, Head of Digital, Volcom Europe

“It was great to have a dedicated team that was accessible to us as we navigated the Nosto implementation. We’re a very lean team, so whoever we partner with, must have excellent customer service when we need the support. Nosto has become an extension to our team.”

Berly Isaak, Senior Director Global Marketing, LeSportsac

“Nosto’s A/B Testing and Optimization allowed our team to quickly test different personalization strategies and learn valuable insights. We saw an 18% uplift in conversion within weeks on a single test — it was incredibly easy to set up and deploy. The tool automatically switched over the majority of the traffic to the winning variation freeing us from having to constantly monitor test results.”

Emily Andrews, VP of Ecommerce, Cynthia Rowley

“Nosto’s personalized product recommendations give us the ability to deliver highly relevant recommendations with a much larger variety of merchandising goals than native recommendations. The flexibility of the tool gives us a lot of added value, and their easy integration into Commerce Cloud made it so that the entire process was quick and painless.”

Post-Pandemic Shifts in Consumer Shopping Habits: Authenticity, Personalization and the Power of UGC

Matthieu Galtié, Head of Digital, Volcom Europe

Berly Isaak, Senior Director Global Marketing, LeSportsac

Emily Andrews, VP of Ecommerce, Cynthia Rowley

Bianca Mercer, Ecommerce and Customer Services Director, Smythson