Shopping Trends: How to get more from ecommerce this year

TheFind's Usher Lieberman, Director of Corporate Communications, offers insight into trends within ecommerce and how brands can benefit from back-to-school and holiday shopping - right now.

Kristina: What do you expect to see, shopping wise, from the back-to-school season come up?

Usher Liberman: As kids head back to school, grassroots social media efforts, those that happen without the encouragement of brands or stores, have the potential to drive some interesting trends as lists of supplies and fashions are traded and modified online. [We expect] that savvy shoppers will look to stretch every dollar as far as possible and as a result we may see a precipitous rise in mobile searches occurring within brick and mortar shops."

Kristina: Looking ahead to the Christmas holidays, what trends are you seeing?

Usher: Mobile shopping. By the time this holiday season is over, mobile comparison shopping while inside the brick and mortar store will become an ingrained and common consumer practice. Once learned by consumers, behaviors become very hard to change. The challenge for retailers is how they either embrace or try to repel this trend. For retailers with well integrated cross channel strategies, mobile shopping offers a lot of opportunities while at the same time it will clearly expose the weaknesses of others.

Kristina: What can brands do now to prepare for the holiday rush?

Usher: Aside from the basic blocking and tackling of ensuring that their servers are ready for the additional traffic and their product feeds are up to date and being submitted through engines like Google and TheFind, brand and retailers should be seeking new commission-based channels which offer low or no upfront risk. In addition, retailers and brands who have not yet executed on a mobile strategy can pursue partnerships with leading mobile apps in order to ensure they appear in mobile comparison results. On the social shopping front, retailers and brands have an opportunity to assist savvy consumers by making it easy to create and customize holiday shopping lists that can potentially be shared amongst friends and relatives.

Tags: 2010 holiday shopping, back to school, ecommerce, holiday shopping, online shopping, TheFind