Holiday Online
The season’s brightest retail spot may be the Web; plus, shipping/handling strategies and windows on the fashion world
While many are anticipating retail this holiday season to be flat or somewhat diminished, one thing seems clear: Consumers will be buying online in record numbers—again.
Before the tragic events of Sept. 11, a record-breaking peak for non-holiday purchasing was set this past August when the number of U.S. online buyers hit a record 39 million, purchasing more than $4.7 billion in goods, according to e-commerce trade publisher iconocast.com.
Now, with consumer fears of shopping in large malls and the potential difficulties of transporting gifts in airline baggage, online merchants are quietly anticipating an unprecedented surge in online retail.
According to the most current Nielsen/NetRatings and Harris Interactive study of 36,000 online users, the surge has already started, with e-commerce sales showing growth of 54 percent in September compared with the previous year.
Conservatively, an impressive $9.9 billion in sales is the prediction for the season ahead, with apparel—always the No. 1 gift category—leading the estimated spending spree at $2.44 billion (followed by books/music/video at $1.7 billion, auctions at $1.36 billion, toys at $1.1 billion and computer hardware at $.97 billion).
Another respected marketing research firm, Forrester, says the season will likely hit $11 billion, noting that in the current climate people just don’t want to be in crowds.Fine-Tuning the Online Purchase
Jupiter Media Metrix statistics, reported on ecommercetimes.com, show that an unsettling 63 percent of online shoppers back out of a purchase when they see how much they have to pay for shipping and handling. They just abandon their virtual shopping cart full of potential sales, never to return to that store again.
Where fear of credit card fraud once was the major barrier in consumers’ minds, the high cost of shipping—and the often-sneaky last-minute manner in which it is sprung on the shopper—is now the major customer complaint about online retailers.
Smarter Web sites are catching this drift, with more offering free shipping instead of the all-too-transparent secondary revenue stream of marked-up shipping/handling costs. But a reasonable middle ground is possible.
Web sites could simply show the total price of an item throughout the shopping process, instead of tacking on the bad news at the end. Or they could promote free shipping after certain thresholds (such as a purchase total of $100) are reached.
Many better sites have already implemented these strategies, while smart consumers realize that, one way or another, shipping costs have to be paid. They simply don’t want to tolerate a shipping cost as a merchant’s covert profit margin.
The lack of consistent standards from site to site, too, adds to consumer suspicion and confusion, with some e-tailers computing shipping/handling on the basis of weight, cost, size or other seemingly arbitrary formulae.
Voices in the industry are pointing toward the establishment of some kind of level playing field, but no organization for negotiating those standards is on the horizon.
In the meantime, online retailing continues to enjoy a lack of taxation (apparently to continue for at least another year), which has been seen as exactly the factor that compensates for shipping/handling charges in the minds of those consumers who do complete their purchases.Cool Site of the Month
Visual merchandising is the dominant theme of a nifty site called fashionwindows.com, where you’ll find some of the best store-window fashion exhibits ever. Launched in 1997 by Dallas-based Tom Massey, Boyd Davis and Mari Davis, the site has now added information on fashion designers and fashion items as a logical adjunct. The site has resonated with readers so successfully that many have started sending it photos and articles, so a healthy collection of news and commentary about fashion trends and visual-merchandising tactics has developed, along with a “MarketWatch” section that keeps track of apparel players in the stock market. The site is fun and fresh—a valuable resource to anyone in the apparel industry
