Friday 21 December 2012

eCommerce Holiday Spending



A huge $96 billion to be spent online over the holiday season


Calling all online retailers, are your products in front of the 52% of consumers who will take their Christmas shopping online this year?

Holiday seasons are the busiest time of year for many online retailers worldwide and thankfully this year’s holiday spending is up. According to eMarketer, online shoppers in the United States will spend $54.47 billion this holiday season, up 16.8% from $46.63 billion in 2011 marking four years of consecutive e-commerce spending growth. 

So what does that mean for online retailers? Overall this is great news; however, they may need to up their game as retailers are becoming more competitive. Retailers are aware that the majority of shoppers will turn to the internet to find the best deals and avoid crowded stores.

Marketplaces, shopping comparison engines, and social recommendation sites are the top channels that bring consumers to web-stores. In fact a whopping 94% of shoppers conduct research online before making an online purchase, according to the Compete Shopper Intelligence Study.  As a result, smart merchants spend time and resources to market their products through various online channels to drive traffic to their storefronts.

One of the fastest growing tools that retailers use to market their products across shopping comparison engines is RetailTower, which allows retailers to avoid the integration hurdles online retailers face when adopting 3rd party tools to promote their products. RetailTower has developed pre-built integrations with leading shopping cart solutions such as Shopify, Magento and osCommerce and recently announced its launch on BigCommerce. RetailTower makes it exceedingly simple for merchants to manage multiple campaigns across leading comparison shopping engines like Google shopping, Amazon, and Bing.  

Easy signup through these multiple platforms, access to all major shopping comparison engines, plus a freemium model has enabled RetailTower to become one of the largest and fastest growing feed management tools in the world.

Creating an email marketing campaign is another powerful method to drive ecommerce sales. A survey by YesMail Interactive found out that 80% of online shoppers say email offers influence their purchasing decisions. MailChimp is a good free tool to test this option.

Increasingly, to compete retailers need to incorporate social into their stores and marketing plans. Instant.ly reports that 44% of shoppers have bought a product they’ve seen shared on social media with 85% of these shoppers finding the item on Facebook. In light of these trends it makes sense for retailers to explore this channel too. Social sharing integration and Facebook adverts can be powerful tools for merchants to expand their business.

Finally the more traditional methods such as SEO, PPC and blogger outreach are still traffic drivers. Clever GirlsCollective published that 93% of people they surveyed said they’ve purchased a product from a blogger recommendation.




[1] Shop.org
[2] National Retail Federation