We reported last month that 25% of consumers said that they had started or planned to start their holiday shopping in September. In addition to starting their shopping early this year, 68% of Gen Z consumers plan to shop in what have become to be known as “non-traditional” channels, according to a research report from Brightpearl.com cited by this article in Retail Dive. Commerce continues to combine with social media as merchants move closer to meeting their customers where they are, and as a result leading sites like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are emerging as shopping destination sites.
“In the pre-internet age, retailers gradually realized shopping can be a form of entertainment, and a wider social activity, which is not only fun for consumers but also results in more sales,” Brightpearl.com spokesman Nick Shaw said in a statement.
The clearest example of this was the growth of the mall format in the 90’s, where shopping malls became social destinations and shopping was the fun activity to do with your friends at the mall. We’re now seeing this develop in the online world, where friends can meet on a social media platform and shop together as they would have at the local mall. A full quarter of the respondents in the Brightpearl.com survey said that they planned to shop via livestream at some point this holiday season.
According to Shaw, “As such, traditional stores made more effort to make shopping ‘an experience’ — a form of leisure. The ‘new normal’ for commerce this holiday season and beyond is now likely to be framed by many non-traditional ways of shopping, which provides a huge choice to consumers and retailers.”
While advertising on Facebook is not new this year, video clip platform TikTok’s partnership with Shopify is, with users being able to move seamlessly to commerce sites directly from TikTok videos. This parallels what Instagram has done with Shopping in Reels and Shop tabs, features that lets content creators tag products with direct links to commerce. Twitter and SnapChat have also been introducing their own versions of commerce tools that both exposes platform users to products and creates a path for them to make purchases directly from the platform.
“It is inevitable that more and more shoppers will buy and spend online in a variety of ways — especially as we approach Christmas and Black Friday,” Shaw said. “Unfortunately, many retailers will miss out because they aren’t set up to quickly add the new selling channels or payment methods that their customers now prefer.”
The research also looked at shoppers’ payment preferences, with more than half (58%) planning to use PayPal, and most planning to use either a credit card (51%) or debit card (47%) to pay for their holiday purchases. Other payment options indicated by the Brightpearl.com research include Amazon Pay (32%), Google Pay (29%), Apple Pay (26%) and Klarna (16%).
The holiday shopping forecast has long been used as a barometer for retail sales and the general health of the economy, and even more so as stakeholders across the value chain struggle to define what our post-COVID “new normal” will look like. In addition to the changes we’ve highlighted on when consumers are shopping, this report reveals the changes in where they are shopping. What still remains to be seen is whether supply chain challenges will affect what shoppers are buying, and the million dollar question, how much they are spending.
Overview by Don Apgar, Director, Merchant Services Advisory Practice at Mercator Advisory Group