Some 44 percent of online shoppers head to Amazon first when product shopping, far more than once-dominant search engines, according to new research from BloomReach, a company that develops personalized discovery platforms for e-tailers.

By contrast, only 34 percent first use search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, while 21 percent of consumers will check a specific retailer.

The survey also found that Amazon’s dominance is growing. In 2012, Forrester Research found that 30 percent of consumers researched products on Amazon first.

Other notable results:

– Consumers favor Amazon in part because they believe it knows what they want. Some 75 percent of consumers believe that Amazon does personalization best. Walmart.com came in second, cited by 9 percent of consumers, and eBay, 8 percent.

– Forty-four percent of digital marketers consider Amazon their biggest threat, followed by a direct competitor (20 percent) and eBay (21 percent). Personalization ranked as digital marketers’ leading priority over the next 18 months.

– The main reason consumers shop on smartphones is for price and product information, the survey found; about half do this while browsing in stores. Eighty-one percent cited laptops and desktops as the preferred way to shop, as 64 percent griped that shopping on smartphones remains too difficult.

“People don’t think, ‘Now I’m going to shop on my phone, now I’m going to shop on my laptop, now I’m back on my phone.’ They just shop,” said Joelle Kaufman, head of marketing and partnerships for BloomReach, in a statement. “But marketers often painfully approach omnichannel personalization in this way [by] siloing data.”

Rob Bates

JCK News Director