Clicks, Carts, and Cold Feet: Understanding the Q4 Shopper

The festive season is here. The ads are running, shoppers are clicking, carts are filling up, and yet, something is missing. The purchases. Sound familiar?

Every Q4, marketers bring out a familiar playbook. Start campaigns earlier, push bigger promotions, sharpen targeting, and hope those festive shoppers come rushing through checkout.

Except shoppers don’t always cooperate.

In our latest Performance+ webinar, Decoding the Q4 Shopper, Harikrishnan Binu, our Global Insights Director, Stephanie Pilon, CMO at Singular, and Bobbie Gersbach-Smith, our Global Planning Director explored what really drives festive shopping behaviour and what marketers can do to turn all that browsing into buying.

Watch the full recording here.

Download the webinar slides here.

The shopping season is getting longer. Much longer.

In the UK, around 46% of consumers had already started their festive shopping before November last year. But that doesn’t mean everyone’s buying early. Plenty are researching products, comparing prices, building wish lists, and waiting for the right moment to spend.

• $14.25 billion was spent online on Cyber Monday alone, making it the biggest shopping day of the season.
• 25 separate days recorded more than $4 billion in online spending.
• The previous year, only 18 days had crossed that threshold.

So those big shopping moments still matter. But spending is now spread across a much wider window.

What should marketers do?

Experiment with allocating 15–20% of the festive media budget to August–October activity, particularly for brands that traditionally concentrate spending around peak sale days.

The objective? Build consideration while shoppers are researching, then remain visible when they’re finally ready to purchase. And measure whether that early investment improves brand recall and consideration during peak shopping periods.

Discounts? Maybe not.

According to GWI, free delivery is a stronger online purchase incentive than discounts, with 50.7% of consumers citing free delivery compared with 38.9% for coupons and discounts.

Yes, free delivery beat discounts. Why? Because shoppers are looking for value, convenience, reassurance, and sometimes just one less thing to worry about.

There are five different unblock modes a shopper can be in before they feel ready to purchase.

• Friction-averse: Wants things to be easy. Free delivery, smooth checkout, and simple returns can make the difference.
• Deal-conditioned: Waiting for that convincing offer. A clear, credible promotion helps move them along.
• Evidence-led: Needs proof. Think reviews, comparisons, product information, and recommendations.
• Brand-anchored: Leans towards familiar brands they already know and trust.
• Budget-constrained: Needs financial flexibility, whether through instalments, buy now, pay later, or other payment options.

These aren’t five permanently fixed shopper personalities. The same person could respond to several of these needs depending on what they’re buying. Understanding what’s stopping them right now is the most important part.

Three reasons shoppers get stuck: price, choice overload, and trust.

Yes. there are three common shopping stalls: price, choice overload, and trust. And choice overload is a particularly interesting one.

76% of shoppers say they feel overwhelmed by the number of products available online.

Sometimes, showing someone 20 more options doesn’t help. It just gives them 20 more reasons to postpone their decision. So how do brands respond?

If price is the problem, consider a more compelling offer, free shipping, or flexible payment options.

If choice is the problem, simplify. Curated gift guides, bestseller collections, or clearer product comparisons can make decisions easier.

And if trust is the problem, give shoppers a reason to feel confident. Reviews, testimonials, user-generated content, delivery promises, and return policies all have a role to play.

Brands invest heavily in awareness and conversion, but the content that helps people make decisions, such as product comparisons, reviews, and UGC, is often underfunded. Instead of having one large audience of cart abandoners receiving the same retargeting creative, brands should develop at least three creative tracks addressing price, choice, and trust.

Browsing without buying isn’t necessarily hesitation. It could simply be a decision in progress. The challenge is figuring out which stage of that decision a shopper has reached. That means benchmarking what strong purchase behaviour looks like, tracking the events leading up to conversion, and identifying meaningful patterns. And because shoppers can move between these behaviours, segments shouldn’t be treated as rigid categories. The more precisely brands can diagnose the problem, the more useful their marketing can become.

The channel that gets attention might not get the sale

An ad might introduce a product. But the final reassurance often comes from somewhere else entirely. And the journey doesn’t necessarily stay online.

Take Gen Z for example. Despite being digitally native, physical stores remain an important part of their shopping journey, particularly for discovering products and building confidence in a purchase.

They might visit a store to see something in person, then head online to complete the transaction. So, the question for marketers becomes less about identifying the one channel that converts and more about understanding the job each channel performs.

AI is becoming the shopping assistant

Around one in four consumers use AI for personalized recommendations. And 23% use AI chatbots to research products. Think about what that means for someone overwhelmed by choices. Instead of individually researching 30 products, they can ask AI to narrow them down to three.

AI can compare features, summarise reviews, assess delivery timelines, and help identify the most suitable option.

It’s no longer enough for product information to look good on a website. It needs to be clear, consistent, structured, and understandable to AI systems that might be interpreting it on the shopper’s behalf. That includes product specifications, reviews, delivery terms, return information, pricing, and the things that make a brand distinctive.

First, invest in Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), making sure AI systems can find, interpret, and accurately represent the brand’s products and distinctive qualities.

Second, keep investing in brand building. Familiarity, trust, and distinctiveness still influence which option a shopper feels comfortable choosing.

“Make it easy for the machine to understand, but hard for the consumer to substitute.”

Harikrishnan Binu, Global Insights Director, M+C Saatchi Performance

Last click doesn’t tell the whole story

A consumer might discover a product on mobile, revisit it on desktop, engage with an email, see another ad, and eventually purchase through an entirely different channel. Last-touch attribution captures the end of that journey. But what about everything that helped get them there?

That’s where multi-touch attribution (MTA) comes in.

Rather than crediting only the final interaction, MTA helps marketers understand how multiple touchpoints contribute to a conversion.

And the benefit isn’t that switching on MTA magically creates more revenue. It helps reveal the channels that were already contributing, so marketers don’t accidentally cut valuable activity simply because it wasn’t responsible for the final click.

So, what should marketers do differently this Q4?

• Plan for a longer season. Build consideration early, stay visible through the research phase, and maintain investment around the broader conversion window.
• Diagnose before discounting. Understand whether price, choice, or trust is holding shoppers back, then tailor creative accordingly.
• Invest in the middle. Product comparisons, reviews, gift guides, and reassuring content deserve a bigger place in festive plans.
• Prepare for AI-assisted shopping. Make product information machine-readable while continuing to build a brand people recognise and trust.
• Measure the entire journey. Look beyond the final click, track across devices and channels, and understand which investments are genuinely influencing purchases.

Because sometimes, the shopper doesn’t need another discount. They just need a little help deciding.

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Missed the conversation? Catch the on-demand recording of Decoding the Q4 Shopper: Why Don’t They Just Buy?