'Tis The Season For Shopping

By Shannon Marshburn

The winter holiday season is my favorite time of the year. I love participating in family traditions, the cozy hot chocolate and movie marathon nights, and I love to give the people around me gifts that create smiles and memories. My least favorite thing of all is the holiday shopping season, and that is why I vow to have my shopping done before December begins. 
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I am not alone in this shopping trend, as Black Friday traffic at retail stores are down 28.3% from 2019, according to preliminary data from Sensormatic Solutions. With retailers operating with reduced hours and the pandemic hanging around, many shoppers stayed home. You may think online shopping is taking place of these in-store shoppers, but even the online retailers are seeing a decrease. 

Adobe Analytics tracked a total of $8.9 billion spent this year by online shoppers, falling short of the 2020 spending amount of $9 billion. Adobe suggested this difference might be due to an increase of early season shopping with sales and promotions being pushed as early as October this year. When online Black Friday shoppers made their purchases this year, Adobe found that 44.4% of those sales were made from a smartphone, a 10.6% increase from 2020. 

We can see a trend happening here so far, there are early sales starting months in advance, and with mobile purchases greatly increasing! As a business it is very helpful to be adaptive to the quickly changing market and consumer needs. Here’s what you can do as a business to keep up with these trends:

• Make buying easy! Facebook, Instagram, and soon TikTok have integrated shopping into their apps. The consumer never has to leave the platform to make purchases and this makes buying quick and convenient. 

 

• Get a head start. We can see that shoppers are planning ahead for their holidays, helping the customer work on their gift list by offering early sales. Don't want to start sales early? Use the early months to get ahead on marketing so when you are ready for the sales, your target customer will be ready to pull the trigger. 

 

• Use creative marketing to stand out in the crowd of other Black Friday campaigns. 

 

• Put your focus on Cyber Monday. While black friday numbers are down, cyber monday was booming with U.S. shoppers spending $10.7 billion. That is a crazy number to even think of, but this still hits at a 1.4% decrease from online shopping numbers reported a year ago. 

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