Taking The Pulse Of Holiday Shopping In 2015

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Thanks to the proliferation of big data in retail, brands have a nearly limitless source of information to draw off when creating marketing campaigns and tinkering with products. Fortunately for retailers uneasy about making it into the black this holiday shopping season, a new report from RetailMeNot and Placed includes several data points that should point to a profitable few months.

The first “State of Holiday Shopping” study, which pulled responses from more than 10,000 consumers, found that about 82 percent of shoppers are planning on spending either as much or more than they did during November and December 2014. The average consumer will drop $492.27 on presents, with 56 percent of these shoppers concentrating their activity on Black Friday in particular.

What should leave retailers with a warm feeling inside is just how much consumers plan on bumping up their holiday budgets. The study found that of shoppers who said they’ll be dropping more dollars in 2015, 35 percent said they’ll be spending anywhere from $251 to $500 more than they did last year. A further 16 percent said their budgets had ballooned by $501 to $750, and a stunning 19 percent admitted that they planned on spending more than $750 on top of what they spent last year.

Interestingly, the 2015 holiday shopping season could turn out to be a landmark event for omnichannel retailers. About 55 percent of shoppers indicated that they planned on splitting their purchases roughly evenly between online and offline merchants. David Shim, founder and CEO of Placed, explained that this could be the year that omnichannel truly stakes its claim to a significant part of the retail market.

“This holiday shopping season is the Year of Omnichannel,” Shim said in a statement. “The lines are no longer blurred, but merged when looking at the way consumers research and spend this holiday season where Black Friday and Cyber Monday are nearing parity in terms of consumer participation.”