CRM Vendor Predicts December 12 Will Be Biggest Shopping Day Ever
October 10, 2007
After analysis of previous years' holiday sales figures, CRM and eCommerce vendor Volusion predicts that the biggest shopping day of the year will break the typical pattern seen in most years this decade.
From 2000 to 2005, the biggest online spending day of the year fell on a Monday, the vendor's research has found -- "Shoppers tend to spend time browsing in stores on the weekends and then buy gifts online when they return to work, where they usually have the fastest internet connections. This pattern held true in 2006 as well when on Monday, December 11th, consumers spent $556 million online."
This was the biggest online shopping day in history, until Wednesday, December 13th, when consumers spent a whopping $667 million.
The biggest online spending day this year will be Wednesday, December 12th, 2007. "The Monday halfway between Thanksgiving and Christmas has been biggest spending day of the year every year this decade with the sole exception of 2006," Volusion officials say:
"Merchants will be pushing their free and discounted shipping promotions that won't end until the 17th or 18th, and consumers will respond to these later promotions by waiting to purchase on Tuesday and Wednesday instead of Monday. Expect sales to exceed $750 million on December 12th, 2007."
In early October Volusion announced the release of the newest version of its e-commerce product. Most of the over 40 new features, including new CRM tools, "had at one time been requested by a current Volusion store owner," company officials say.
Among the new innovations are enhanced site features and functionality, advanced product and category management tools, advanced order processing features, new CRM tools, design improvements and additional integrations. A major upgrade to V5 will also be seen in the form of new shipping functionality, which includes true shipping integrations, company officials say.
With the new version, merchants can now retrieve negotiated live rates from every major shipper and those live rates will take into consideration package dimensions, products shipping separately and orders shipping from multiple warehouses.
A major feature request was also filled with V5's ability to offer full "per product" dimensional shipping support for UPS, company officials say.
Last year Volusion announced that they had developed free software called Volusion Live Chat, which the called "a 100 percent hosted live chat software, which meaning there's nothing to install on your servers."
And if that's not good enough, it's free to any and all PC users, even non-Volusion customers.
David Sims is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
