The Business Tactics to Attract Shoppers During The Holiday Shopping Season

Holiday shopping is a stressful time of the year. Usually beginning on Black Friday and extending through Christmas, stores try to have a variety of tactics to get customers into their doors and away from their competitors.

As Christmas becomes ever closer, stores begin to use tactics for the procrastinators that might have just started shopping. Some of these tactics include using social media to target their customer directly, offering free shipping and extending store hours.

People respond to the incentives that stores offer during the holiday season. Incentives such as offering free shipping, and extended store hours will all get more customers into different stores and opening their wallets. By offering free shipping, a website will probably get more orders than a website that is charging their normal shipping fees. Similar to this, by having extended store hours, a store will most likely attract more customers in a day than a store that closes at its normal time.

The busy holiday season and the emphasis that is put on it influence the choices of consumers and the incentives that are offered to them. As the date of Christmas inches nearer and nearer, procrastinators know that stores still want their money, and therefore will tailor specific incentives to them as a customer.

Businesses are able to create wealth through voluntary trade. On certain incentives such as free shipping, they are giving up the money that could have been made on charging for shipping. Businesses do this in the hope that it will attract more customers to their site, and thus will create a larger profit for them.

The consequences of the hectic holiday season lie in the future. Each year, it will probably become increasingly frantic and stores will continue to offer these types of incentives, not only to increase customers but also to compete with other businesses who are offering similar incentives.

The choices that stores are making this year involve a cost. By focusing solely on increasing the amount of sales and traffic into their stores for the holiday season, businesses may be neglecting what they should be doing after the holiday season is over, which could possibly lead to a loss in profit.

Businesses are able to economize because of the decisions that they make during the holiday season. While some businesses are hoping to create a profit from cutting a cost to the customer that would have possibly gotten the business more profit such as shipping, others are turning to social media. One example is with Best Buy who is using the hashtag “#LastMinuteGifts” in order to draw attention to its holiday products that they want to sell. This free way of targeting their shoppers instead of losing money in the hope of gaining it back, allows them to economize.

The view of the author that the shorter holiday shopping season has created a bigger frenzy to finish holiday shopping is correct. As this shopping season only has four weekends instead of last year’s five, procrastinators are feeling the short time quickly ticking away. This article relates to class because we have discussed economies of scale. The holiday season is typically when businesses are able to start turning a profit which would be reflected in on the upper half of the curve, where profit is made. In the future, businesses will most likely continue to create more incentives for holiday shopping procrastinators, in order to get them into their stores and continue making a profit off of them.