Mobile Drives Holiday Forecast
It may only be October, but here’s a prediction: It’s going to be a high-tech holiday, and I’m not talking about the gift-giving part of it. (Although in a refrain I think will play out in countless homes over the next couple of months, my 20-year-old godson has told his family the ONLY thing he wants for Christmas is a new Apple phone.)
But the big story this year is likely to be retailers’ increased use of emerging technologies that bring the digital and brick-and-mortar worlds together. The main impetus for these efforts is mobile technology, according to market research company eMarketer, which specializes in digital marketing, media and commerce.
Naysayers of mobile like to point out that very few sales actually take place on a mobile device. They’re right. (eMarketer put the figure at 1.2% of all retail sales, during its webinar, “Holiday Shopping 2014 — Online Trends and Forecast.”)
But don’t be fooled: The influence of mobile’s impact on retail is much more significant than actual sales. A majority of U.S. smartphone owners in all age groups shop in-store with their phones. And eMarketer estimates that in the upcoming holiday season, mobile shopping (i.e. research) before or during in-store trips will influence between a quarter and half of all U.S. retail sales.
With more and more shoppers using their phones as part of the physical shopping experience, retailers will expand programs that make phones even more powerful shopping tools, particularly beacons and visual search.
“More than half of the top 100 retailers are actively working with beacon technology now,” said Rob Murphy, VP marketing at beacon provider Swirl, during the webinar.
Murphy predicted that at least several retailers will announce very large-scale beacon retailers to support their holiday campaigns. In fact, at press time Macy’s revealed it was rolling out beacon technology in 4,000 stores nationwide, the largest beacon deployment in retail.
Retailers are also seeing opportunity in visual search, which was pioneered by Amazon’s Firefly. eMarketer sounded a cautious note about this tool during the webinar, saying that until visual search can readily identify objects in the wild, and from different angles, it will not be embraced by shoppers.
The webinar also addressed one of the most vexing challenges retailers faced during last year’s holiday season: fulfillment. The takeaway: Shipping will remain a challenge this year, at least in part because shoppers increasingly expect quick and faster delivery. But retailers are turning to distributed fulfillment (shipping from stores), in-store pick-up and better coordination with shippers to help mitigate problems.
And while the holiday sales projections are just starting to come in, eMarketer was one of the first out of the gate with its forecast. Here’s how the digital research giant sees things playing out:
Total U.S. retail sales will increase 5.0% in November and December in 2014, an improvement over last year’s growth of 3.4%
U.S. retail e-commerce sales will grow 16.6% this holiday season, up from last year’s 15.3% increase.
Marianne Wilson
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