The data and trends are very clear: online shopping is eating the world.
According to the National Retail Federation's annual holiday survey, the percentage of consumers who reported that they planned to do their holiday shopping online has been increasing steadily over the years. For example, in 2019, 56% of consumers planned to do their holiday shopping online, up from 52% in 2018. Additionally, a survey by Deloitte in 2020 found that 71% of holiday shoppers planned to do at least some of their holiday shopping online, up from 66% in 2019.
And there is no end in sight. Particularly as more people are shopping online due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of remote work. More people are distributed globally.
But that has not stopped us from celebrating. No matter where we are those birthday's, holidays, weddings, baby showers, anniversaries continue to be a cause for celebration. Even if your sister is getting in married in California and you're working remotely from a village in Bali.
Or even for when you live 5 minutes away and have no excuse other than life got in the way, it's easier to visit 20 online stores than 5 in person.
Online gifts are becoming the new norm and each year are taking up more and more of the share of sales of online stores.
There has never been a better time to buy those gifts online and have them arrive wherever in the world you're not.
The problem is traditional gifting strategies in e-commerce have failed to keep up with needs of consumers. Gift cards are impersonal and detract from brand recognition. Not to mention they fail to deliver the emotion that a gift is meant to provide.
It can be a black hole for merchants and store owners as well. Tracking gift card data and matching it with gift recipient spending habits is difficult and cumbersome.
Considering that the pace of online shopping is not slowing down and the share of those sales that are being used towards gifts is growing, in order to capture those gift sales, online stores need to adopt new strategies to convince consumers to gift with them.
That is why we created the Gifted App for Shopify. Through our Gift widget on product pages, gift givers can easily add personalized touches to their gifts via a digital gift email that the recipient will receive on the day they choose to be delivered right to their inbox.
When the recipient receives the digital gift they see a personalized message and a link back to the store so they can view the gift they'll be receiving directly online and get excited for it's arrival.
This also becomes an extremely powerful and sticky referral strategy: introducing the gift receiver to a brand someone close to them trusts and likes. Through our app we've seen many gift receivers convert to new customers.
We believe that the right gifting strategy can be a huge customer acquisition strategy for stores. That is why we provide the gifting data within our app so that stores can easily see who is gifting what products and use the email data of the gift recipient to offer them incentives such as discount codes to incentivize them to continue shopping with them. Long term we believe this can drive a significant boost the LTV of a customer.
Overall, given the pace of online-shopping and the growing share of online gifting we believe that new gifting strategies will be critical to a brands success in capturing this revenue, acquiring new customers and increasing the lifetime value of that customer.
We have TONS of ideas for how to do this effectively within your store. Check out our app on the app store or reach out to us at info@givewithgifted.com for any questions or just chat with us about e-comm trends.
