What is Shopping Product? Definition, Characteristics, Types, and Examples

Shopping product is one of the types of consumer products and other includes convenience, specialty, and unsought products. Let’s understand what shopping products are, their characteristics, and their types.

What is a Shopping Product?

A shopping product is an infrequently purchased consumer product that demands customers to think about its price, quality, design, styles, and other attributes before buying the product.

Consumers usually do not purchase shopping products regularly as they purchase convenience products. And, these products are often of higher prices than convenience products.

Consumer compares prices, quality, design, convenience to buy, features, and other attributes before purchasing shopping products. Examples of these products include mobile, airline tickets, clothes, furniture, etc.

They purchase these products on a non-regular basis and they have usually higher prices. So the consumers compare different products and select the one shopping product that pays well value to their money.

These products are often available at selected or limited outlets. However, sellers provide deeper customer supports to help them to understand products and compare them with other brands.

Characteristics of Shopping Product

The followings are the main characteristics of shopping products. These features of shopping products help to differentiate them from other consumer products.

Related: What is Convenience Product?

• Infrequently Purchased – Shooping products are less frequently purchased as compared to regular products.
• High Price – A shopping product has higher prices as compared to a convenience product. As such consumers purchase it less frequently and compare the price, quality, design, utility, etc. of the product before making a purchase.
• Fewer Outlets – Convenience products are easily available in different places or shops. But shopping products have fewer outlets, they are available in a limited place.
• Advance Purchase Plans – Before purchasing shopping products consumers usually plan in advance. They try to gather information about the product like price, quality, places to buy, and durability, and compare their capacity to pay.
• Durable – Shopping products are usually durable in nature take the example of mobile, furniture, etc.
• Time-Consuming – Consumers usually take some time to purchase these products.
• Sales Support – Although these products are available at limited outlets sellers do provide sufficient knowledge to customers about the product.
• Affected by Fashion Trends – The demand for shopping products is directly affected by fashion trends.

Types of Shopping Products

There are four main types of shopping products. They are:

Homogeneous Shopping Products

These are the shopping products that have the same quality and often fall under the same category. Homogeneous shopping products often do the same work and consumers may know only a little difference between the products.

Also Read: 5 Levels of Product

For example, personal computers with similar attributes are hard to differentiate. Consumers may differentiate products only in terms of brand name, customer reviews, the information provided by the supplier, etc.

Examples of these shopping products include laptops, refrigerators, washing machines, and other electric and automobile products.

Heterogenous Shopping Products

Shopping products that have dissimilar characteristics to each other are called heterogeneous shopping products. These products can significantly differ from each other in terms of core benefits, price, quality, design, styles, and other attributes.

These shopping product features play an important role in affecting the purchasing decisions of consumers. For example, clothing, furniture, dental services, pianos, etc.

Attribute-Based Shopping Products

As the name suggests, attributes, consumers step in gathering information about product features such as quality, design, performance, service, warranty, delivery option, etc. and they choose the product that has the best combination of attributes they wanted to have.

Price-Based Shopping Products

These are those products customers judge product attributes and prefer the cheapest one. Here, customers have become more price-conscious. They primarily focus on the price of the product instead of other attributes when making buying decisions.

Also Read: What is Augmented Product?

Examples of Shopping Products

As we have understood what the shopping product is, its types, and some examples. Let’s put some general examples of shopping products.

• Clothes
• Furniture
• Mobile
• Laptops
• Refrigerators
• Washing machines
• Inexpensive cars
• Watches
• Bicycles
• Bus tickets
• Airline tickets
• Bikes, etc.

Strategies to Promote Shopping Products

Since consumers lack information about the shopping products they invest considerable time to identify the right product for them. Let’s look at some strategies that you can use to promote shopping products.

• Make sure to provide adequate information about the shopping product so that consumers can compare the products.
• Prove products in varied sizes, quality, colors, and other attributes.
• Helps consumers to compare similar brands and choose the right one.
• Work with well-known brands because shopping products buying consumers are more quality conscious.
• Provide adequate customer warranties and follow-up service to increase consumers’ perceived value.

Also Read: What is Specialty Product?