3 Omnichannel Shopping Trends to Expect This Holiday Season

By Lucy Maher

Retailers are expected to adopt a host of new strategies to attract shoppers this holiday season, and retailers with a high volume of holiday shoppers each year often schedule their seasonal marketing efforts beyond the days between Black Friday and Christmas Eve.

For many shoppers, holiday researching and purchasing spans months, with consumers turning to desktops, smartphones, and tablets to engage with brands before entering their stores. This has prompted omnichannel-focused retailers to look into several new strategies for reaching their audience on whatever platform they may be using.

It’s a smart move, but a gap remains between merchants integrating an omnichannel strategy and consumers beginning to shop in this way. According to SPS Commerce’s 2015 Retail Insight report, 37 percent of U.S. retailers polled said they lacked a long-term, omnichannel strategy,[1] but more than half of U.S. Internet users have mixed both online and offline shopping for product categories including consumer electronics (65 percent), apparel (64 percent), toys (63 percent), and home appliances (58 percent).[2]

However, it may not be enough to simply integrate an omnichannel strategy—ensuring the experience across these channels remains consistent for shoppers is important too.

“In the past 15 years, we’ve moved from one channel—brick-and-mortar—to three, and the increase brings a greater challenge for merchants to ensure the shopping and payment experience remains seamless,” said Soumya Chakrabarty, Director of Research & Development at Discover. “While more shopping channels have emerged over time, consumers don’t want a different experience between those channels, but instead a seamless experience across all three. Having an omnichannel environment that seeks to ensure the experience remains continuous and consistent for consumers is critical, as they interact with merchants through their mobile device, in the store, and when they visit the retailer’s website.”

Here are three key trends to expect this holiday season:

Retailers Will Offer a Range of Fulfillment Options

Shoppers are used to free shipping and returns over a set dollar amount. But this holiday season, they’re likely to find a much broader set of delivery options, often designed to get purchases to them as quickly as possible. Indeed, U.S. online shoppers are interested in same-day delivery (61 percent), a specific, agreed-upon delivery window (43 percent), and 90-minute delivery for in-store purchases (37 percent).[3]

Hyper-local Messaging Will Grow

Last year, a few major retailers experimented with beacons, a technology that allows brick-and-mortar businesses to customize mobile messaging to reach shoppers in their stores via a downloadable smartphone app.

This year, beacon-triggered messages are expected to influence more than $4 billion in retail sales, a number that is projected to grow 10 times in 2016.[4] And though beacon deployments are still limited—29 percent of retailers see them as high-value[5]—retailers are expected to continue to test this technology via WiFi and digital displays to communicate with consumers in-store.

“One main benefit of the current mobile landscape is that electronic devices are already Bluetooth enabled, and beacons capitalize on this functionality to easily communicate with mobile devices,” Chakrabarty said. “This offers merchants a simple channel through which to reach consumers and reduce friction in terms of consumer adoption, as it is already integrated into their phone or tablet.”

According to Chakrabarty, beacons could start to make the aspect of payments disappear into the background of a retail shopping experience. With the help of beacons placed in various locations through the store, a merchant can enable consumers to pay through the beacon right near the product they chose.

Pure-Play E-Commerce Brands Will Dabble in Physical Stores

Why invest in a brick-and-mortar presence when you’re a successful online retailer? It seems counterintuitive, but that’s what some holiday-focused e-commerce brands may be doing during the holiday season. They’re expected to join a handful of retailers, including Bonobos, Warby Parker, Rent The Runway, and Amazon, in making the transition to brick-and-mortar.

It makes sense. Nearly 40 percent of consumer respondents to an October 2014 poll conducted by PWC said they purchase items from a brick-and-mortar store weekly, compared to 27 percent buying online each week.[6] Retailers not ready to make a long-term commitment may instead choose to go the “pop-up” route, which can generate buzz without the capital costs associated with a more permanent presence.

In the end, adopting new technologies and an omnichannel retail strategy can be a large undertaking, but could bring lucrative opportunities.

“When merchants begin to plan out the omnichannel experience, it’s important to consider the consumer experience they want to provide and consider all channels, from mobile, to brick-and-mortar, to big browser,” added Chakrabarty. “Discover can help build customized plans to ensure that clients are receiving the same great experience across any channel they engage through.”

[1] SPS Commerce, Retail Insight 2015 Report

[2] GFK, “Smartphone “Showrooming” Dips, “Webrooming” surges across generations in the U.S. – Latest GFK FutureBuy® Shopping Study”, Oct. 20, 2015

[3] PWC, U.S. Total Retail Survey 2015: Retailers and the Age of Disruption

[4] Business Insider, “How beacons—small, low-cost gadgets—will influence billions in US retail sales”, Feb. 9, 2015

[5] RSR, Empowering the Store Employee: Benchmark 2015

[6] PWC, U.S. Total Retail Survey 2015: Retailers and the Age of Disruption