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The ease of online shopping has shaped the way consumers prepare for the festive season. With competitive offers, gift wrapping and free delivery online now offers that ‘perfect’ gift and has resolved that age old question of “what to buy?”. But has the effortlessness of a ‘click and buy’ generation misplaced the heart and warmth behind venturing into the real world and looking for that perfect gift?

Google Insights shows that searches for ‘Christmas gifts’ have reached unprecedented heights when compared to last year in addition to which searches for ‘personalised Christmas gifts’ have increased by 40%. Online advertisers this year are capitalising on this shift in consumer wants and needs, we no longer need just a gift but want that gift to evoke a feeling.

This holiday season John Lewis have successfully run advertising campaigns on and offline encouraging consumers to ‘find the perfect present’. With the option to shop by recipient we can now be inspired with the knowledge that if we choose to buy we are choosing an ideal gift. Similarly, Comet have now changed their slogan to reflect this shift from ‘we live electricals’ to ‘we deal in your ideal’.

To overworked, time poor consumers online shopping has provided the opportunity to not only find a gift but discover ‘the’ perfect gift for their loved ones this Christmas. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues into 2009 reflecting the change of consumer mindset or if this is just a way for retailers to get around ‘Crunchmas’…

Monday has been heralded as ‘Mega Monday’ with online shopping sales rising by 14% year on year. Online shopping in the USA has also seen a large boost with a 15% jump in online transactions year on year for cyber Monday (1st December). Comscore’s latest report also points to a sharper growth in online retail sales for this past week, indicating the potential very last minute boom in online sales, preceded by a dip in transactions. This may be what UK retailers are experiencing this year.

All signs point to next Monday actually overtaking Mega Monday to become the biggest shopping day of the year. Google Insights saw spikes in search impressions for terms such as wii, ipod and dvd on the week ending the 23rd Dec last year, with search impressions for ‘ipod’ more than doubling from the previous week. With Amazon’s last free delivery order date being Thurs 18th and users holding off for Christmas offers, next week could be retailers biggest opportunity to take advantage of this years online shopper trend.

So what should online retailers be doing to maximise their sales during this period?

1. Start by updating copy daily to reflect your top competitive prices, the market is very price sensitive at the moment and users are looking for the best deal.

2. Users need to be encouraged to buy now, a countdown in creative to final delivery dates could help by injecting a sense of urgency into the purchase decision.

3. Searchers are going to be waiting to see what sales you will be running pre-Christmas especially with the current trend towards last minute sale days, by fixing your last sales date and stating this in your creative users will start to commit to purchasing now.

4. Ensure that you can fulfil all of your orders by Christmas, you do not want to risk damaging your brand for the New Year. As you will be aware, news of poor service online travels fast!

5. And lastly, and possibly most importantly, ensure you have the media budget to support the increase in interest next week, don’t think that because this week may be beginning to slow down that this will be it for December, you may be surprised!

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