ECommerce sales information and opinions from Rob Charlebois, selling online since 1998, driving over 20M in annual ECommerce sales.

Holiday Merchandising, Black Friday, Cyber Monday

October 28th, 2007 Posted in Merchandising

According to the Best Practices and Tips for a Successful Holiday in 2006 report from Shop.org each year consumers are starting their holiday shopping earlier and earlier in the season. If you have not seen this report I urge you to read it as it highlights which tactics are the most useful and most used based on survey results from a variety of retailers. I have highlighted some of key areas of the report below:

  • Free Shipping - 79% of retailers will offer free shipping with conditions during the holiday period. Conditions will most likely come in the form of minimum order value.
  • Email Marketing - Is viewed by the retailers surveyed as the number 1 tactic used to drive online sales with paid search following closely.
  • Site Features and Shopping Tools - Buy online and pickup at the store and product customization are tied for first in this category.
  • Catalog Mailings - This tactic is ahead of the rest by a good margin for those retailers with offline catalogs.
  • Start of Holiday Shopping - Many online retailers said that shopping started earlier in 2005 than in 2004.
  • Biggest Day of the Season - 20% of online retailers cited Dec 12th as the biggest shopping day of 2005.

So by now you are starting to see that the biggest online shopping day for this weekend is “Cyber Monday”, the first Monday after Thanksgiving. With potentially an even bigger shopping day expected on December 10th. At least this is what the Shop.org research says.

I urge you to read this report as well as any others and to comment on this post if you have any ideas, opinions on the topic of holiday shopping or online marketing for this holiday season.

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