HOT E-Commerce Trends To Watch This Holiday Season

During the season to be jolly, e-commerce retailers are inquiring how to be ready for the upcoming holiday season.
The holiday season for most retailers, can make or break the year for their bottom line.
For online retailers, getting your conversion funnels optimized early and logistically will significantly impact
your year end margin.

ecommerce-holliday-trends

The two trends that will have an impact with online shopping as we approach the important holiday season are:

Mobile Shopping and Fast Delivery

TREND 1: Fast Deliver: Immediate Gratification with Same-Day Delivery

Retailers are taking advantage of hyper-local product sourcing in the ongoing batting with Amazon.
According to Ebay, it is partnering with major retailers to offer same-day delivery for the holiday season. By sourcing
products from brick and mortar retailers, eBay aims to get delivery times down to an impressive hour in some locations.

Best Buy, Macy’s Nordstrom and Walgreen’s have joined eBay’s program. Their goal is to achieve what people are
used to in this day and age, specifically the Millennials: instant gratification!

TREND 2: MOBILE, MOBILE, MOBILE

Like in real-estate, location, location, location, with online shopping it will be mobile, mobile, mobile.
Mobile will become a crucial component in online shopping and will grow exponentially. It won’t just grow
with straight-forward mobile purchasing behavior.

Shoppers will complete their purchases on their phones and tablets. We saw with the annual back to school shopping,
always an indicator to Christmas, that 20% of mothers said they used their smartphone to do online shopping,
according to IAB’s Mobile Moms Survey last month.

What’s more fascinating is that the increase in “Showrooming” or comparison-shopping online from within stores.
Twenty-five percent of adult cell phone owners used their phones to look up the price of a product
online while they were in a store shopping during last Christmas’ shopping season. This is according to
Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project report released earlier this year. After another
year of smart phone and tablet market saturation, prepare to see more of this behavior this year.

This behavior will contribute to sequential multi-screen shopping. According to Google, most multi-screen shopping will
start shopping on their mobile phone, but complete the purchase at a later time on their PC, usually within the same day.

Therefore; smartphones are the most common starting place for consumers for online shopping.

How Do These Trends Affect Conversion for E-Commerce Business/Revenue?

As the holiday shopping season comes upon us, retailers need to focus on making
improvements for conversion on both their PC and mobile websites.

You must try to influence positive conversion increases:

A: Implementing Site-Wide Improvement via Template Tests:

Focus on value proposition, merchandising the product breadth on home and category pages, and making
sure there is is product clarity information and calls to action on the product detail pages.

Test individual custom mobile experiences with calls to action and messages that are appropriate for segments.

B. Test Variation of Promotions and Campaigns for Conversion Efficacy:

Retailers rarely test their offers and campaigns. While a lot of resources is put into planning a tempting offer and
getting interest, there’s not as much effort on an iterative offer or promotion optimization campaign.

While have a hot holiday promotion is great, having various forms of a promotion will allow you to monitor which
promotions are successful and which ones aren’t. Additionally, the insights you will gain
from testing will give you the added bonus to adjust and make informed decisions for future promotions

WiderFunnel will give you ideas on how to improve your key templates. WiderFunnel has a
Conversion Analysis service where our strategists do a LIFT analysis of your page
and give a recommended hypotheses when enables you to test it and improve it before the holidays.
Contact us for more.

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