Scroll, stream, search, shop: Why Google’s 4 S behaviors are the new path to purchase
June 17, 2025Deliver product content that matches consumer behavior at every step using a PIM solution designed for omnichannel performance and speed.
The marketing funnel of today has shifted from more traditional models like ‘AIDA’ model of Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action to one which doesn’t follow such a ‘straight line’.
Nowadays, buyers don’t follow a linear path when they’re looking to make a purchase — they stream, scroll, search, and shop. Industry giants like Google have already identified a buyer behavior pattern that they call the ‘4S behaviors’. It serves as a clear reflection of how product discovery and decision-making are happening in online e-commerce today.
For brands, it marks a change in how product marketing should be approached. It’s no longer enough to be ‘findable’ at the point of purchase; through their product content, brands need to be continuously present, consistent, and compelling across every relevant digital touchpoint.
This means that your product information needs to be not only accurate, but also quickly adaptable, enriched, and ready to meet the consumer — wherever they are.
In this article, we’ll look at the ‘4S behaviors’ driving product content strategy today (Streaming, Scrolling, Searching, Shopping), and how a Product Information Management (PIM) platform like Inriver PIM can help your brands deliver what they need to for each of these stages.
Streaming: A new way to discover products
Consumers have probably encountered your product on a screen long before they even begin to think about actually buying it. It could be that they’ve glanced at it on a website, or seen a customer review video on YouTube, a TikTok ‘unboxing’ clip, or a digital display ad — but what it means is that ‘streaming’ has become a key entry point in the buying journey.
The challenge is that, in these early moments, the product and/or brand ‘story’ matters more than the physical features of the product itself. Consumers are looking for emotional connection, social endorsement, and inspiration, so to stand a chance of resonating with them, brands need to push rich product content that is media-ready and leans into the storytelling element.
How the right PIM platform can support the Streaming stage in the customer journey
Using a modern PIM platform allows you to centralize and organize your product data alongside all of your rich media assets, including videos, lifestyle imagery, and interactive content. This makes it far easier for brands to store, manage, update, and distribute exactly the kind of visual content that helps to drive product discovery online.
Housing everything in one place also means that your brand’s product story remains consistent across multiple online channels, so that both the brand narrative and the quality of customer experience is well-protected.
Scrolling: Conquering your buyers’ infinite feed
The influence that ‘scrolling’ has on buyers shouldn’t be underestimated. Despite it being an automatic online behavior for browsing consumers, it can aid product discoverability simply by revealing not what someone was looking for, but what happens to be there, waiting for them.
Although these moments last for mere seconds, these interactions can spark real buying intent if the potential buyer has found your brand’s content engaging and relevant to them.
Equally, if your product content doesn’t catch someone’s attention in those first few seconds, the scrolling continues.
It means that your product data needs to be curated for context, optimized for omnichannel, visually inspirational, and descriptive enough to make a consumer feel well-informed.
How the right PIM platform can support the Scrolling stage in the customer journey
The right PIM platform grants your teams the best chance to capture consumers’ attention; by helping them to create dynamic product bundles and curated collections for different sales channels — while also ensuring that brand consistency remains intact, wherever your products appear online.
PIM software like Inriver PIM enables content adjustments to be made quickly and easily in-platform, so that brands can keep up with trend-driven campaigns and themed, more seasonal periods while saving significant time and manual effort — and all without the need for IT support.

Searching: Where interest can deepen or die
Consumers use search engines, marketplaces, and other retail sites to research, explore, validate, and compare products they’re interested in buying. Since 2020, Google has called this “the messy middle” of the customer journey, where decisions are made through a dynamic loop of both exploration and evaluation.
For brands to stand out, they’ll need to deliver the most clear, trustworthy, relevant content to the consumer — especially when their competitors are likely to appear on the same search results.
How the right PIM platform can support the Searching stage in the customer journey
This is where having a centralized, dynamic source of product information suddenly becomes a strategic advantage for your business.
A modern PIM solution like Inriver strengthens your brand’s search presence by providing a ‘single source of truth’ for all of your SEO-optimized product data. This helps to keep your product information consistent and compelling across every digital shelf; helping guide shoppers towards the ‘Shop’ stage.
Shopping: Turning browsers into buyers
A customer may have reached the checkout point, but the journey isn’t over yet — there are still several obstacles to overcome, like bracketing and cart abandonment. These behaviors signal that your shopper still has some questions about your product/s.
The good news is that scenarios like cart abandonment can often be prevented when your brand provides customers with the assurances they need through your product content. Adding enriched content, enhancing product descriptions, and displaying your returns policy clearly are all ways to do this.
How the right PIM platform can support the Shopping stage in the customer journey
A powerful PIM system like Inriver can help brands build customer confidence and drive high-conversion shopping experiences through its ability to ensure complete, accurate product data exists across every digital sales channel. And, by empowering a brand’s merchandising, marketing, and e-commerce teams to provide the right product information, at the right time, and in the right place, the risk of customer returns is reduced.
Brands can also use performance data from within the PIM platform to see which content and assets are working the hardest for them, allowing more informed content decisions to be made by their teams.
Navigate the 4S behaviors by delivering better product content
The new consumer journey is fast, fragmented, and fueled by product content. Whether they’re ‘streaming’, ‘scrolling’, ‘searching’, or ‘shopping’, it’s the quality of your product information that’s going to dictate whether consumers notice, consider, and choose your products.
In order to stay competitive, brands need to be agile enough to update, refine, and republish content when it’s needed, consistent in how they deliver that content to omnichannel — and all while managing thousands of SKUs, campaigns, and product collections in the background.
Inriver PIM is already trusted by 1,600+ global brands — turning their backend data into a revenue-driving force, and delivering what’s needed to satisfy the 4S behaviors found in today’s discerning consumer.
Want to see the Inriver PIM in action?
Schedule a personalized, guided demo with an Inriver expert today to see how the Inriver PIM can get more value from your product information.