A major consumer shift for eCommerce

Here’s my big reveal for B2C retailers. Searches for “gift delivery” are exploding, in line with the traditional delivery periods over the year. Why? Because we’re all stuck indoors! No more socialising, no more birthday parties, no more anniversaries. Can you pivot your retail business to capitalise?

What I learned

• Gift delivery is the new trend
• Are gift vouchers an option for you?
• Are your presents gift-worthy?
• Can you personalise?
• Get ahead of the curve and boost your sales!

Transcript

Hey, welcome back everyone. Second show this week. Told you I was going to do more. This is a follow up to the one I did on Monday around Mother’s Day ideas. Do you remember that one? How’d you go with that? What have you got that can help people looking for Mother’s Day ideas? All right.

That’s just the start of where you need to be thinking with this. If you are a B2C retailer, heck even a street performer, maybe you could use some street performance on the nature strip for Mother’s Day. Who knows? I don’t know if that’s allowed. Probably not. Don’t do that. But there are other things that you could be looking at and this is the big one. So, I told you about Mother’s Day ideas. Well, look at these phrase. Gift delivery. That’s growing.

Now today, Andrew Chen, who I talked about on Monday with all the data he was showing from, I think it was Slack line… Something like that. Stackline maybe, I don’t know. Sorry if I misquoted the brand. He’s also talked today about food delivery. This is the big one though, and this will probably be the next one he comes up with, which is gift delivery.

Why is it the big one? Well, let me give you some perspective. This is the last seven days for Australia. This is the past 30 days. Significant. This is the past 90 days. Huh. Now, what’s interesting here in the past 90 days is that this big spike here, which is of course Valentine’s Day. There are essentially two main dates for gift delivery in Australia and they are Valentine’s Day and they are Christmas.

Let’s take it out a bit further. Let’s go for 12 months. So we get that Christmas peak in there. Oh my. Now have a think about this. Why? Why is it happening? Now I’ve spoken to a number of gift hamper suppliers and florists and they are major beneficiaries of this right now. There are exceptions to that. Some clever stores out there and I think some of the clever retailers have already noted this and have doubled down on doing gift vouchers. Good idea.

Why is it happening? Simple. Really when you think about it, you go, “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that Jim?” Everyone’s at home. I can’t go to your birthday now. As much as I wanted to. I really was looking forward to it. So what am I going to do? I’m going to compensate. I’ll buy you something online. I’ll send you something. That’ll be fun. Everyone is doing that now.

It used to be with Mother’s Day, some people even used to just go and buy a gift on the way to their mom’s place. I’ve heard. That’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know if that’s true. People tell me that. Well, they can’t do that now. They’ve got to plan. They’ve got to think. Now that’s just 12 months and you can see that it’s already more than probably double what it would normally be at peak times during the year. So when we take that out even further to the last five years, we can see that this… And let me take it out for all time is actually… I’m going to use the U word here. It’s unprecedented. We have to buy something. We need to buy gifts. This dotted line is telling us where it’s going to go because this is predicting for all of April this. It is.

What are you doing and when you go and have a look down here, gift delivery Sydney, same-day delivery, gift hampers, birthday gift delivery, gift delivery per, once again the important thing here, well one of the important things here to understand is that people were typing this in, haven’t decided on what gift they’re buying yet. They just want to know what they can get delivered. The retailers that are really going to… we’ve already teed up a few of our retailers who would be ripe for this. Get some gift idea categories, get some gift packs. Can you do gift wrapping? Can you do personal messaging? These are the things that you’ve got to look at because the retailers that can do those things now are really going to capitalise on this trend.

Because it’s like if you go into a store, a normal shop bricks and mortar, and you might strike up a conversation with the person behind the counter and they might say, “Oh, what’s this for? Who are you buying this…” “It’s a gift for my mom, for my dad, for my brother.” “Oh, do you want me to gift wrap it for you?” “That’d be awesome. Thank you.” So if you can do that online and you can send a message with the gift as it’s being delivered, fantastic. No one wants to order a gift, get it home, pay shipping, re-pack it, wrap it, put a card in it, take it back down to the post office, pay shipping again. No one wants to do that, right? They just want to be able to get a gift to their loved ones.

It is spiking. It will continue to spike and there’ll be a whole raft of different things. The way you can capitalise on this, of course, is gift delivery is going to be very expensive in AdWords now! Obviously, sorry, hamper people. Sorry, florists. There’s a few who I know will probably be a bit grumpy at me this morning, but hey, this is good for every retailer, right? And I want every retailer to understand this because it helps all of us and there’s enough business to go around that we won’t be taking it off the hamper people. We might be taking it off the flowers people, they’re always going to get that traffic. It’s just at the moment they’re getting a lot more of that traffic than what they can actually handle.

I’ve even spoken to some people that would sell industrial equipment and I’ve said, “Have you got any tools that you could maybe package up as gifts? Have you got something that could constitute a gift?” Start talking about it on your site. Start talking about it in social. Start reflecting that in your ads. Start reflecting that in your EDMs. Let your database know that you can do gifts because most retailers don’t understand this. They actually sell gifts. They really do, but online that is not a focus because gift delivery is the realm of gift hampers and flowers. So we thought.

Well, now’s the time to change that. Now is the time to look at what you’ve got, how you can lay out your navigation so it makes sense for people looking for gifts. Is your search function working properly on your site? Have you done a mystery shop for people trying to buy gifts? Have you done a mystery shop of your site in general to make sure everything’s working? I did this. I explained to someone via LinkedIn the other night, hi Steven. That a new service launching, a new food delivery service launching. The signup process asked me to give a password in the signup process and then they sent it back to me in clear text in an email and asked me to change it. That’s a major, major, major, major, major security issue for them, but I found it simply with a mystery shop to go and say, “Hey, you probably don’t want to do this because you’re probably going to get into trouble, and a lot of people are going to be very, very grumpy at you.”

So the mystery shop is important right from the signup through to the delivery. Get the branding in the package. If you’re an eBay seller, if you’re an Amazon seller, for goodness sake, make sure you’ve got your branding in the package. How do I know to come back to you? How do I know that you make it easy? There’s obviously challenges if you’re doing 3PL and those sorts of things, but doesn’t mean that you can’t sell gifts and package them as such on your site.

Hopefully that’s helpful. It should be. Let me know how you go. Let me know if you’re using this. I’ve already worded up a few e-commerce mates and they’ve just gone of course. It’s stupid, right? Yes, of course. So it’ll be a couple of days before the rest of the world wakes up. So you’ve probably got a little bit of a head start to start getting your site in order. Our clients have already had a little bit of a head start and now you have as well. Hopefully, that’s helpful and we will see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.