Holiday results update: enticing researchers to buy now

The final countdown is on for the 2012 holiday season, and our weekly snapshot from the MarketLive Performance Index shows that merchants have much reason to rejoice. By and large, key performance metrics such as conversion and average order size are holding steady, allowing merchants to capitalize on increased traffic to win double-digit revenue gains both for the week and the season as a whole.

Comparing last week to the same time period in 2011, merchants saw traffic increase by more than 25% and revenues jump nearly 14%, with average order size remaining steady. For the season to date, top-line performance is even stronger, with both visits and revenue seeing gains of more than 27%.

Key performance indicators have slipped slightly as shopping research has intensified and shoppers began completing purchases offline to ensure gifts are in hand on time. This week, conversion and engagement both dipped, although season-to-date performance is still up compared with last year. For the second week in a row, cart abandonment rose — by 2.2% last week and 1.8% this week — nudging average cart abandonment for the season higher than last year’s rate by 0.7%.

While the results are rosy indeed, merchants could realize even stronger gains by capitalizing on increased traffic more effectively to drive higher conversion and staunch abandonment rates. Indeed, the most successful merchants are successfully negotiating the end-of-season frenzy by:

Stepping up messaging about delivery options. As discussed in our post on Free Shipping Day, cutoff dates for holiday delivery should be prominently highlighted across touchpoints. But beyond that, merchants should communicate other methods for shoppers who complete purchases online to receive their gifts in time. Key services and options to promote include:

• Fast shipping. Consider offering a free shipping upgrade or even free expedited shipping to help reassure shoppers that gifts will arrive on time.
• In-store pickup services. Merchants with physical locations who can offer the ability to buy online and receive merchandise in-store should not only promote availability of the service in general, but highlight specifically how short the timeframe is between order and pickup. Sears offers same-day in-store pickup of items ordered online — a service promoted in a global banner, in promotional slots on category pages and on product pages, where shoppers can view in-store in-stock status for multiple locations.

Putting the emphasis on scarcity. Merchants who highlight exclusive products or limited-edition items, and who flag unique gifts that are going fast, give shoppers an incentive to complete purchases immediately rather than continuing to click around the Internet doing research. To step up the urgency, merchants should:

• Put unique items front and center. Merchants should highlight exclusives in email, social and paid search campaigns, and let shoppers sort and filter on-site search results to focus on items not found anywhere else. Helzberg Diamonds uses email to promote the exclusivity of its “limited edition” line by touting the small number of items produced and the unique packaging, which includes a certificate of authenticity.

• Use in-stock status to promote urgency. On the product page, rather than simply communicating whether an item is in stock, merchants can make transparent quickly-dwindling inventories of hot items by letting shoppers know exactly how many remain once the number drops below a certain point. Merchants can even create a sense of further scarcity by limiting the number of purchases per customer, as Toys R Us does with this item from its “Hot Toys” list, which is additionally flagged with a banner letting shoppers know it’s an exclusive.

How are you encouraging holiday shoppers to move from research to purchase?