Clicking with Hispanic Online Consumers

As the biggest minority group stateside, the burgeoning buying power of the Hispanic population is hard to ignore. U.S. Hispanic online shoppers are forecasted to lay out $12.8 million on retail spending in 2007, comprising 11 percent of all online retail expenditures expected this year, according to "Demographic Profile: Hispanic Shoppers Online, 2007," a Jupiter Research report. Hispanics will spend more this year than all minority groups assessed in the report, including African Americans ($9.2 million) and Asian Americans ($6.7 million). In fact, the report projects that Hispanics will continue to spend more online than other minority groups during the next few years--$21.6 million in 2011--compared to $15.4 million by African Americans and $10.8 million by Asian Americans that year. The online retail expected spending from these minority populations combined, however, trails that of the "Caucasian and other" group considerably. That population segment is expected to spend $75.7 million in 2007, rising to $123.2 million in 2011. Despite projected across-the-board uptake in online retail spending, most online consumers--66 percent of Hispanics and 72 percent of non-Hispanics--did not contribute content online regarding products during the past year, according to the report. (These findings are based on a March 2007 Jupiter Research/Ipsos-Insight retail consumer survey of 209 U.S. online Hispanics and 1,900 U.S. online non-Hispanics.) However, survey results indicate that online Hispanics are slightly more engaged than non-online Hispanics when it comes to rating items (2 percent more), tagging products (3 percent), and posting products on their social networking pages (1 percent). They're also 5 percent more likely to blog about products and 6 percent more likely to post product reviews on sites other than a retail Web site than their non-Hispanic counterparts. "Hispanic users' top reason for posting online information about products is to help other customers make good purchase decisions, but Hispanic users are twice as likely as are non-Hispanic users to say they wanted to vent about bad experiences or warn other customers about products' shortcomings," the report states. For retailers interested in gaining more traction with the Hispanic online consumer base, the report suggests that they incorporate customer product reviews and recommendations from others. "Hispanic users are twice as likely as are non-Hispanic users to agree they often buy products online they had not planned to buy because other customers posted that they liked the products," the report states. "Similarly, Hispanics are also influenced by recommendations from friends. Thirty-four percent of Hispanic users said friends influence their decisions to purchase products costing more than $200 (versus 28 percent of non-Hispanic users)." Related articles: Hispanic Marketing Goes to Universidad A Nearshore Niche in Nicaragua Ethnic Consumers Require Sensitive Marketing