The results of this holiday season are topping the charts for online spending. Certainly direct-to-consumer retailers had similar success. Here are some interesting data points…

According to comScore, Inc., spending reached $18 billion for the season, up some 18 percent versus last year. Some of the important aspects contributing to this success were in great part, especially successful marketers allocated adequate search budgets to capture heavy e-commerce activity to focus on the online-to-offline connection. DoubleClick Performics research reports that 70 percent of respondents said they search before making any online purchase; 57 percent do so before making any offline purchase, and 64 percent use search engines to find out where to purchase products offline. Most offline holiday shopping happens on the weekends, but not everyone buys in the stores. Many go online during the week to purchase what they did not find over the weekend, price-check with competitors, and pursue deep online discounts and deals. Some of the reasons for the increase in e-commerce include free shipping, gift-wrapping and overnight delivery. It was also reported that shoppers who saw products on television ventured online to investigate the products they saw advertised. Forrester Research reports that free shipping offered a tangible lift in sales, with 61 percent of their respondents saying they bought online as a result of free shipping. And finally, Forrester’s research showed that consumers were willing to pay for extras such as gift-wrapping or overnight delivery—both of which increased online shopping.

Are these findings in line with your experience?

Sigi Friedman is ERA’s vice president of board and strategy

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In my role as editor of the e-weekly news from ERA, I end up reading a lot of articles about retailing statistics (I know, heady, glamorous stuff) and there are two things that keep popping up: retail sales generally are growing at around 4.8 percent while online purchases are making up a bigger percentage of sales this holiday season (20 percent to $39 billion, according to Jupiter Research). If you extrapolate that to figure out total holiday sales, we know that Americans will be spending $195 billion. But there is one factor that is lurking in the background that throws the whole equation into turmoil. Thirty-three percent of consumers planned to buy gift cards to the tune of a staggering total of $26.3 billion

You may be asking yourself, “Why should that matter?” Well, for one thing, $26.3 billion is not being recorded as part of the holiday shopping season, because that revenue is not recognized until the gift cards are redeemed. Or to look at it another way, the actual total collected by retailers if you throw in the gift card number will be $221.3 billion. So if $195 billion without gift cards represents a 4.8 percent increase, the math says that $221.3 billion represents a 19 percent increase in revenues over last year. Of course, that doesn’t include gift cards from last year. So while the analysis of the holiday shopping season is all glum and foreboding, the nay saying should be taken with a $26.3 billion grain of salt. (more…)

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