How your customers shop and buy products is changing quickly in this digital age. Our latest research report, What Customers Want – 2nd Edition: A Distributor's Guide to Customer Buying & Shopping Preferences, provides insight into how your current sales channels are still important. But their effectiveness is changing and the mix of how customers are using your channels is changing significantly.

Some key takeaways from this edition include:

• The data show a more pronounced shift to digital and in-person shopping and buying methods from print. That change is accelerating.
• Email is among the top methods preferred by end-users for ordering, and search continues to be a primary channel used for shopping. But most customers use multiple channels for shopping and buying.
• National and global competitors with effective multichannel offerings continue to take market share from smaller competitors.
• Customers in construction markets, who are inherently more mobile, are making some of the biggest shifts in how they want to shop and buy, in part due to the rise of increasingly robust mobile technology.

This is the seventh year that MDM has partnered with Real Results Marketing to conduct research into e-commerce to gauge adoption levels of digital tools. This report, which surveyed more than 8,000 customers of distributors across many product sectors complements our ongoing trend research at the distributor level to get a deeper picture of the evolution and impact of digital channels on traditional distribution models.

The report provides a revealing view of customer shopping preferences, customer buying preferences, customer communication preferences and customer preferences on product availability, selection, expertise and other service attributes. The report also examines the role of e-commerce and other ordering mechanisms in customers’ selection and preference of distributors, as well as the functionality customers want when shopping and buying online.

This is the second extensive business-to-business, customer-based shopping and buying survey for wholesale distribution we’ve sponsored. The data and analysis in this report will challenge you to think differently about what your business needs to better serve your customers and can further inform your company’s specific plans.

Click here to learn more about the report or to purchase What Customers Want – 2nd Edition: A Distributor's Guide to Customer Buying & Shopping Preferences.