How Come Shopping Frequently Remains Hard Work for Consumers?

One of the major changes occurring in the past forty years is a shift from conditions of limited information on products, specifically greater difficulty to access or obtain sufficient relevant information, to conditions of abundant information, whereby demanding greater effort to screen, learn and evaluate the rich and detailed information, visual and verbal. The abundance of information is mainly in virtue of the different online or digital channels available. Furthermore, information is provided on many more product options that could be relevant to the consumer’s need, goal or task (‘job’). Indeed, earlier challenges in obtaining necessary information to make a sound choice decision have been reduced, but just to be replaced by new challenges of handling the flowing information reachable at almost one’s fingertips.

In an article for Retail TouchPoints, Devora Rogers, Chief Strategy Officer at Alter Agents (a research firm on shopper behaviour), introduces a puzzling question: “Why doesn’t shopping feel easier despite everything retailers have done to simplify it?” Her article is titled “When Convenience Stops Feeling Convenient” (Retail Touchpoints, 6 August 2026; also see a brief in Alter Agents’ own website). Rogers considers some of the developments implemented by retailers for improving and facilitating the shopping experience, such as fast and smart search tools, recommendation engines that remember past purchases and enable personalisation, shorter delivery windows, and the emerging AI assistants that can provide helpful guidance in response to queries, even before the consumer enters a retailer’s website (online store). Yet, she then points to findings from research of Alter Agents suggesting that consumers view the situation differently from retailers.

First, fewer American consumers-shoppers described their shopping as easy than when that question was presented for the first time in 2019. Rogers writes that the finding was surprising to the research team since for several years consumers’ perception of ease of shopping was quite stable, but then it dropped in the past year (see note below). Second, 4 in 10 Americans reported leaving a retailer’s website because “the number of choices became overwhelming” (the title to a chart on Alter Agent’s website reads “Shopping got faster; Choosing didn’t”, pinpointing the problem for consumer decision-making). Consumers visiting an online store may leave after some browsing without making any overt choice or after already choosing and adding some prospect product items to a ‘shopper basket’ (i.e., a known problem of online cart abandonment) — quitting either before or after adding products can be related in the current context to confusion or uncertainty shoppers may feel about their choices.

• Note: The sentiment of discomfort about shopping is related to a broader phenomenon revealed in research of Alter Agents and described as “trust recession“, that is, an erosion or retreat in trust of consumers. It is related to difficulty to cope with greater uncertainty, and is affecting also shopping perceptions, beliefs and behaviours. The researchers found a gradual decline in the perception that “shopping is easy” (agree much/somewhat) from 2019 to 2026, but it seemed to drop faster since 2024 (73%-71% in 2019-2020, 69%-67% in 2024-2026).

Consequently, consumers might continue searching and learning about more product options or offerings (e.g., prices) from other retailers. More broadly, as Rogers explains, consumers are actually turning to more sources in directing their shopping process, where in addition to retailers’ websites they also are using search engines, social media platforms, review sites, podcasts, video content (brand-originated or user-generated), and AI tools (e.g., the Gen AI type of advice in response to queries). An increase in this behavioural pattern has been observed over recent years; Rogers refers to both the growing number of sources being used and furthermore to the way in which each source may be applied to support different decisions (e.g., consulting reviews for real-world experiences, learning about a category with a search engine, viewing video demonstrations of product-in-use). Consumers may compare products across separate sources, or they may use a tool provided by the retailers to compare product alternatives from competing brands; and where a retailer does not provide adequate information about a given product, they may refer to the product-designated webpage on the brand’s or manufacturer’s website.

That means that consumers become skilled researchers who develop proficiency in selecting sources and learning from them according to the kinds of answers they are looking for. The concept of ‘consumers-as-researchers’ is particularly highlighted in the brief of Alter Agents on its website, describing the skills consumers-shoppers acquire and develop in using those sources differently, including the use of AI tools and AI-generated summaries recently added to the mix.

• The above also applies to services, for instance in tourism, travel and hospitality. Suppose we go back to the 1980s: You might have received a list of hotels from a travel agent (with minimal information on each hotel), received recommendations with contact details from family and friends, and got more information directly from the hotel on the phone. Another option was referring to more detailed information on hotels (with some photo images) in booklets which one could obtain from a public tourist office of a destination city or site (e.g., in person during a visit, by mail order or from relatives); booklets could be relied upon for several years forward with reasonable accuracy. Since approximately 2005 you can view ample of information on websites of public tourist boards, tourist booking platforms, and of course the websites of hotels (chains & private), offering rich text and plenty of images. It then takes time and effort to screen, review, sort, evaluate and choose hotels that fit one’s preferences — with the hope of success in booking in one of the hotels desired. (Note: similar changes apply to vacation apartments and houses for short-term rental).

Although retailers introduced measures to make shopping experiences more convenient and smoother, and removed frictions, shoppers feel they have to work harder to find what they need or seek. Retailers usually install tools and features to facilitate procedures in different stages of the shopping (research) process and thus reduce the effort needed. Nonetheless, it has to be reckoned that these aiding measures cannot eliminate completely the need to invest a certain level of effort in the process to achieve satisfying decisions (see comment later on AI-enabled tools). We should distinguish between two measures ascribing to the shopping experience (online and offline): time and effort — they are oftentimes aligned but they are not highly correlated. That is, two consumers may spend the same amount of time seeking some product information on a retailer’s website yet exerting quite different levels of effort and having rather different experiences.

For instance, Jim may rather quickly reach the relevant product webpage and concentrate on reading the specifications, spending in total ten minutes; Robert, on the other hand, may find himself spending ten minutes moving between a few product webpages without finding the informational cues he has been looking for to make a decision. During those ten minutes Robert has probably invested more effort than Jim and felt less satisfaction and pleasure in the process. Robert could have a different kind of experience, of course, if after investing more effort he did find a product to his liking and ended up with a feeling of content. It is reasonable to expect a task that requires more effort also to demand more time. However, consumers may get tired and frustrated by the extra effort they had to make and quit too early. Conversely, consumers shopping in a friendly environment that demands less effort to perform certain (research) tasks may actually be encouraged to stay longer, explore more products and enjoy the experience — this is true especially for physical stores when the emotional experience is more prominent than efficiency.

Rogers proposes to study more deeply the processes consumers follow and their experiences with methods such as shopper journey studies, brand tracking and other forms of quantitative research. These methods should help to identify the task or goal the consumers were trying to accomplish (e.g., comparing similar products, answering one last question before making a decision), and they can help to fill gaps in knowledge by revealing “how consumers move between information sources, which sources influence at different stages and where the purchase process begins to slow”, insights that transactional or behavioural data are less likely to provide or support.

There is still room for retailers to make more improvements that may relieve stress and effort and make the shopping experience less of ‘hard work’ for consumers, as suggested by Rogers. She offers a constructive guiding question: “Where do shoppers actually begin to struggle?” Subsequently, different directions for exploration or explanations may be considered, such as whether a problem is encountered with “the assortment, the product information, the reviews, or something else entirely”. Importantly, the answer to that question is likely to vary across product categories, and therefore it has to be studied and measured through consumer research rather than assumed. Consumers appreciate improvements already made by retailers (e.g., in speed, convenience and personalisation). “The next opportunity” for retailers, says Rogers, “is understanding how people actually make decisions in an environment where information is abundant and every purchase draws from multiple sources“. Such understanding, according to Rogers, which includes, for example, knowing the spots where consumers hesitate and identifying information that genuinely helps them, would make retailers “better equipped to create shopping experiences that feel easier as well as faster“.

Let us add here three more issues for consideration on routes to improving the ease of shopping experiences online:

1. Many retailers’ websites provide in their online stores interactive menus that allow visitors-shoppers to screen, drill-down and prune from the overall catalogue subsets of the products that best fit their requirements or preferences by ticking-in their choices on a list of criteria. This is a very useful tool that can help consumers cut short ‘endless’ browsing. An additional option is search by free-text or keywords on products with ‘smart’ self-completion of suggestions for the search query. But the screening tool is foremost helpful and valuable — the question is how many consumers do apply this tool? It better be retained and consumers should be encouraged or ‘nudged’ to use it more often.
2. There is great importance to the quality, clarity and aesthetics of the display of information in text, images and video. Factors to consider like ‘clean’ layout (no clutter), comprehensibility of verbal descriptions, text-image relations, and appealing images (with interactive rotation and motion where applicable) can contribute to increased processing fluency of product information, and specifically visual fluency (i.e., perceiving visual content feels easy on the mind and pleasant).
3. When using AI assistants, an initial question arises: How many options should the assistant propose: a single “best-fitting” option, 3 to 5 options or more? The AI assistant should give guidance and may help in further steps like accessing more information and evaluation so as to help the consumer to make his or her decision. More advanced autonomous AI agents purport to perform much of the shopping process on behalf of the consumer, based on initial requirements, from research to outright purchase. Should the consumer trust an AI agent to make a satisfactory product choice? Is it really in the benefit of consumers to relegate shopping decisions to AI tools or ‘bots’ as intelligent as they may be? This issue is left open for debate.

Devora Rogers presents a critical issue about shopping experiences that should concern many retailers. She does not offer a definitive answer or solution for reducing effort and making consumers feel greater comfort, because solutions tend to change with category, settings and other circumstances of the choice environment. Instead, she offers instructive guidance on how to approach the challenge and moreover emphasises the need to conduct consumer-shopper research to find appropriate answers as to what retailers should do. Notably. when a task consumers perform, such as researching for shopping, is too easy, they are likely to have less appreciation for their activity or decision outcome, whereas if a moderate level of effort has to be invested, the consumers are more likely to feel fulfillment and content with the outcome. The suggestion thereof is not to make consumers work hard; yet retailers need not feel too alarmed if their customers are required to make some effort. The goal of aiding measures provided by retailers should be just that, guiding and helping consumers through their shopping activity to make it easier, more fluent and convenient, and when needed also faster.