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Posts Tagged ‘Holiday Shopping’

Apple’s online store brought the Merry into the 2009 Christmas season

Filed under: Retail, Apple, Holidays

In some more bright, shiny, and happy Apple news for this first day of 2010, Computerworld is reporting that Apple’s online store took top honors for customer satisfaction in terms of the holiday shopping experience at a computer or electronics manufacturer’s site.

The numbers from Michigan-based ForeSee Results showed Apple’s satisfaction rate at 82%, four percentage points higher than those in 2008. The market research firm measures customer satisfaction by surveying more than 10,000 visitors to the top 40 retail Web sites as ranked by annual sales revenue.

The two closest computer and electronics sites to Apple were Newegg.com and TigerDirect.com, posting scores of 81% and 80%. Dell and HP came in at 79% and 78%, respectively, while the least satisfying shopping experience was provided by Circuit City’s Web site at 73%.

While Apple led computer and electronics Web sites in terms of satisfaction, the company wasn’t even in the same ballpark as Amazon.com. The online shopping giant grabbed a whopping 87% customer satisfaction rating in ForeSee’s survey figures. Other companies that were ahead of Apple in the rankings were Netflix (86%) and QVC.com (83%).

The ForeSee report also notes that the biggest retailers are getting both larger and better, at the expense of smaller online retailers. The big boys on the block can offer larger discounts, free shipping and better customer support that can’t be matched by the small fry.

TUAWApple’s online store brought the Merry into the 2009 Christmas season originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Will 2010 be the Year of Net TV Shopping Integration?

Not long ago it was considered revolutionary to do all of your holiday shopping from your computer. Amazon and other companies on ReadWriteWeb’s List of Geek Shopping Sites make it possible for busy (and lazy) consumers to avoid the department store lines and shopping malls. After looking at what’s in store for 2010, we may find our shopping experience transformed even further.

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Early this month ReadWriteWeb spoke to Boxee’s VP of marketing Andrew Kippen about the company’s recent beta release. While Boxee has gained ground with mainstream audiences, Kippen believes that internet television has some exciting prospects in store for 2010.

Kippen pointed us towards Utvee – a community that encourages members to tag products in TV shows and movies. In exchange for community credits, members identify actors, tag their clothing and offer product details and links to related shopping sites. Essentially Utvee offers video publishers a chance to further monetize their content by creating inline sales referrals. Rather than linking to the cheesy CW t-shirts that a show like Gossip Girl might currently offer, the network can cut its merchandise distribution costs and gain referrals on high-end fashion sales by leveraging the looks already featured in the series.

While the referrals currently exist in sidebar ads and store pages, we’re likely to see a much smoother integration in the new year. In addition to fashion and other types of product placements, there’s plenty of opportunity for inline music purchases and even story arc-related content. There may even be a point where news stories offer links to relevant literature. When you look at PayPal’s recent announcement for IPTV payment integration, it’s easy to imagine a number of possibilities. While it’s natural that users will be able to purchase pay-per-view movies and channels through their television sets, there’s no reason why retail products can’t also become a part of that ecosystem.

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Amazon Wins for Most Visited Site on Black Friday

As we reported Thanksgiving Day, web searches and traffic for online retailers during the holidays were significantly down as compared to previous years, according to research from Experian Hitwise.

However, this Black Friday showed a 4 percent increase in site visits versus Thanksgiving Day traffic – a stat that usually falls between those two days. The retail site that got the lion’s share of traffic this year was Amazon.com, which netted 13.55 percent of the traffic seen by the top 500 retail websites. Read on for a few surprising stats that might signal changes in the U.S. economy – and changes in how U.S. consumers will be doing their holiday shopping.

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Interestingly, Apple’s website saw the largest increase – by a huge margin – between Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. Overnight, their traffic skyrocketed 110 percent. Traditionally, Apple’s online deals for this red-letter day in commerce were modest at best. However, this year, rumors of substantial discounts were leaked online and spread like wildfire.

The lesson: If you want to see a ridiculous upswing in traffic on a major American retail date, maintain relative stinginess and secrecy, then “leak” good tidings of great joy just before the big day.

Other sites that saw a significant traffic increase in this 48-hour period include Staples (47 percent), Dell (40 percent) and Amazon (9 percent).

So, Apple, Staples and Dell take the cake for getting the greatest traffic spikes overnight; how did websites fare on Black Friday overall?

As you can see in the graph below, Amazon and Walmart each performed admirably. What’s more, most sites saw a marginal increase in traffic over last year’s Black Friday traffic – as you’ll recall, the global economy had recently tanked. Do we see this as a sign of tentative optimism about the economy, at least on the part of American consumers?

Finally, who got the most downstream traffic from Black Friday websites? That would be our friends at Walmart, Best Buy, and Target – the latter of which more than doubled its downstream traffic from last year:

Details for Cyber Monday – traditionally the online retailer’s biggest day during the holiday season – will be available shortly.

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Black Friday e-commerce spending rose 11 percent, comScore says

Black Friday online spending rose 11 percent in the U.S. to $595 million, according to market research firm comScore.

This e-commerce spending figure trumps the $534 million spent on Black Friday a year ago. On Thanksgiving day, online spending was $310 million, up 10 percent from $288 million a year ago. And in the first 27 shopping days of November, online sales were $10.57 billion, up 3 percent from $10.25 billion a year ago.

Black Friday was the second-heaviest online spending day to date in 2009.

“Black Friday, better known as a shopping bonanza in brick-and-mortar retail stores, is increasingly becoming one of the landmark days in the online holiday shopping world,” said comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni. “While this acceleration in spending suggests the online holiday season may be shaping up slightly more optimistically than anticipated, it may also reflect the heavy discounting and creative promotions being put forth by retailers that now encompass the use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.”

Fulgoni said that Cyber Monday — the traditional kick-off of the online holiday shopping season — and the subsequent weeks will be the real test for how online retailers fare this season.

One of the new ‘influencers’ are shopping sites known as Black Friday deal sites, which aggregate deals for shoppers. ComScore studied eight Black Friday deal sites for the five days ending Black Friday (Nov. 23-27) compared to the same days last year. Of those, BFads.net led the pack with 3.9 million unique visitors, up 4 percent versus last year. BlackFriday.info followed with 3.5 million visitors, while Black-Friday.net (up 136 percent to 2.3 million visitors) showed the fastest growth.

Meanwhile, comScore said the number of visitors to coupon sites on Black Friday grew to 3.3 million visitors, up 17 percent versus a year ago. Like Experian Hitwise, comScore reported that Amazon.com was the most visited online retail site on Black Friday, with traffic up 28 percent from the same day a year ago.

[Photo credit: New York Daily News]

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Google Brings Local Business Coupons to U.S. Mobile Users

Google has announced today that, just in time for holiday shopping, they are enabling local retailers to display coupons for in-store use on mobile devices of Google-searching users.

Any business using Google Local Business Center can upload mobile coupon offers, and any user searching on Google.com using a mobile device can find the coupons on the businesses’ Place Pages – a feature that also debuted relatively recently. Altogether, the direction the company is taking seems better for users and for local businesses, as well.

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Printable coupons have long been available on Google Maps, but – let’s face it – more and more consumers have abandoned the desktop/printer paradigm for a more mobile/digital approach to search, on-the-go directions, and local business research.

Product manager Alex Gawley wrote on the Google Mobile blog, “With more of you going mobile to search for this information, it makes sense for coupons to go mobile too… We hope you find these mobile coupons useful and that they help you save money, trees (fewer printed coupons), and your hands (from paper cuts) when you’re on the go.”

Place Pages for the desktop have also been revamped to ensure that mobile and printed coupons will share a common look and feel, regardless of the device, the OS, or the browser in which they originated.

It will be interesting to hear and read post-holiday metrics and success (or “opportunity for improvement”) stories about these new mobile coupons. While we certainly hope the setup will allow users to quickly and conveniently engage with the world around them – and we likewise hope local retailers can reach out to customers wherever they are – we wonder how many quickly the coupons will take off and how much users will be inclined to use them.

Would you redeem a mobile coupon you found through Google search, and under what circumstances or conditions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Apple announces one-day shopping event on November 27th

Filed under: Retail, Apple, Deals

As usual for this time of year, Apple has announced a special one-day sale on November 27th, which is Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving). The page on Apple’s online store reads:

“Come back to the Apple Online Store the day after Thanksgiving for a special one-day-only holiday shopping event. You’ll find dozens of great iPod, iPhone, and Mac gift ideas – all with free shipping.

Mark your calendar now. And until then, start your research by browsing the Apple Online Store to find iPod, iPhone, and Mac gifts for everyone on your list.”

There’s no details on what’s exactly going to be on sale, and this doesn’t look like the questionable leaked email we saw last week stating Apple’s Black Friday discounts. Apple has in the past not posted the actual sale prices until early Friday. We’ll let you know when we find out what’s on sale and what those discounts are.

What are your purchase plans? Let us know by leaving a comment!
[via Mashable]

TUAWApple announces one-day shopping event on November 27th originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Shop Different: 5 Sites & Apps to Ease the Pain of Holiday Consumerism

Shopping is horror. The prices. The lines. The hordes of clamoring consumers – the thought of holiday shopping is, in itself, enough to make us wish for simpler days when putting coal in someone’s sock was a legitimate option.

But, whether we like it or not, we can’t Grinch out; so we’d better start thinking about the gift-giving season now and get it over with. And since your friends at ReadWriteWeb are huge geeks, we thought we’d amuse you with a few Internet-enabled oddities that might actually make your obligatory retail purgatory a little more bearable.

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1) Wishzilla

If there’s anything worse than shopping for a loved one’s gift, it’s shopping for a loved one whose preferences, tastes, and needs are a complete mystery. Don’t worry: It doesn’t mean you’re insensitive. You’ve just got your mind on other things.

The solution: For quick, decisive, and possible all-online gift-buying, coerce every potential gift recipient into signing up at Wishzilla. The creators of this site are clearly mind-readers. They’ve kept the clear-cut, actionable sensibility of the gift registry while maintaining the element of surprise. Here’s how it works: Users login with Facebook (or create an account) and then start bookmarking their gift wishlist all over the web. Once the list is done, it’s locked. Signed, sealed, and sent to Santa. What items have been purchased and by whom remain a secret until the wrapping paper gets torn away.

Everyone wins, and no one is left feeling awkward about that good-intentioned but ill-advised sweater.

2 & 3) Customized Clothing for Him, Her, Hym, Etc.

We’ve recently been exposed to the wonderful world of e-spoke apparel. We actually just made up the term e-spoke as a portmanteau of electronic and bespoke; basically, there are a few sites out there that allow for high-quality and entirely customizable wearable goods; in fact, some of them are very forward-thinking technologically.

For the dress shirt-wearer in your life, we have ShirtsMyWay, a site that lets the user completely customize their ideal of collared and cuffed perfection. Our Twitter research have shown that some folks find the site a little spendy, but seriously, a beautiful dress shirt designed to your exact specifications and measurements is worth the extra cost – which, we might add, is significantly less than most other customized apparel experiences.

And for your feminine side, we have Shoes of Prey. The URL alone takes no prisoners, and neither will your fierce creations. Heels on these completely customizable beasts only elevate the wearer a modest 3.5 inches at their highest, but the ability to branch beyond the dyed-satin-bridesmaid-shoe paradigm of shoe customization is more than enough incentive to check out this site.

4) Storenvy

If Craiglist, eBay, and Etsy had some kind of inter-website relations and made a web-baby, it would be Storenvy. In a prettily designed community setting, users can set up buyer and seller accounts. The site is a series of independent online retailers and shoppers who browser across all of those stores at once, interacting with each other by watching what notes and ratings they leave on products and stores throughout the site. Check out the social features in action here, or just set up an account and start having fun.

Better yet, get your friends to set up accounts and thus remove some of the guesswork from gifting.

5) Regretsy, the Gag Gift You Can’t Resist & Will Never Live Down

Rubber chickens, whoopie cushions, every sadistic and horrifyingly cheap Secret Santa atrocity – none of it can match the horrors found on Regretsy. We actually feel pity for the people who buy or receive the Etsy-fueled inventory from this site. If you ever wondered what kinds of jewelry can be made from animal feces or exactly who makes embroidered toilet paper, you have found your web-enabled holy grail. If not, well, you’re in for a good laugh and at least a few ideas for passive-aggressive office gift exchanges. Forced, semi-professional merriment will never be the same.

So there you have it, folks! You never have to leave your three-monitor array of addictive Internet connectivity to satisfy the whims of the potential gift recipients in your life. Just use these tools and a little personal judgement, and all your holiday shopping-related worries can be laid to rest.

We just hope we have a similarly good list when it comes to last-minute shopping; god knows we plan to procrastinate as long as possible, helpful tools notwithstanding.

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Sony’s S-Frame DPP-F700 digiframe / printer hybrid hitting America in January for $200

Need a digital photo frame? Need a printer? Need them to happen within the same enclosure? If you’re one of the oddballs who curiously answered yes — and you don’t actually need it until after the holiday shopping season — Sony’s got you covered. The DPP-F700 digital picture frame with one-touch printing that we saw pop up internationally just last month has finally been blessed with a US ship date and price, and if you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the headline, you’re probably well aware of what those two data points are. The frame itself will boast a 7-inch display (800 x 480 resolution), 1GB of memory, a multicard reader and will print out “professional quality” 4- x 6-inch photos at 300 x 300 dpi. There’s also a nifty “screen capture” mode that prints out exactly what’s displayed during a slide show, though there’s literally no telling how pricey those refills will be.

[Via Slashgear]

Filed under: Displays, Misc. Gadgets

Sony’s S-Frame DPP-F700 digiframe / printer hybrid hitting America in January for $200 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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