Retailers to use variety of marketing techniques for holiday season

24 Oct '07

4 min read

Shipping that holiday gift across the country might not cost a cent this year…if you know where to shop. According to results of the 2007 eHoliday Study, conducted by BizRate Research for Shop.org and Shopzilla, free shipping offers will abound online this holiday season.

The most popular shipping promotion will be free shipping with conditions, which the majority of retailers (78.6%) will offer this holiday season (Free shipping with conditions means that a customer must purchase a certain item or a certain number of or dollar amount of merchandise before receiving the offer).

However, retailers will also use free shipping upgrades (60.4%), discounted shipping (53.5%) and free shipping without conditions (41.4%) to drive sales.

Not surprisingly, consumers overwhelmingly favor free shipping promotions, with almost two-thirds of online shoppers (61.2%) admitting that free shipping without conditions is one of the promotions they would most like to see this holiday season.

“Free shipping offers drive online sales more than any other promotion, which is why they remain popular with retailers,” said Scott Silverman , Executive Director of Shop.org.

“Unfortunately, free shipping is not free for retailers. Merchants can minimize the financial impact of these promotions by carefully analyzing the conditions required for their customers to receive free shipping.”

In addition to offering free shipping promotions, retailers will use a variety of other marketing techniques to increase sales. Nearly two-thirds of retailers (63.0%) will offer online-only sales this year, up from fifty-nine percent just two years ago.

Many companies will also be touting early shopper discounts (35.0%), repeat buyer discounts (37.0%) and “refer a friend” promotions (55.6%).

Even though many retailers will be featuring plenty of bells and whistles on their websites this holiday season, consumers insist that getting the basics right still matters most.

The most important factor for online shoppers is that websites provide good value for the money, which received an average 4.52 rating out of 5.0.

Also, shoppers said that clear product descriptions (4.37), a merchant's reputation (4.31) and guaranteed on-time delivery (4.28) were important features when deciding where to buy.

Despite softness in the economy, online retailers are expecting strong growth this holiday season with more than half of retailers surveyed (51.4%) anticipating online revenue to grow by more than 30 percent over last holiday season.

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