Back in the early days of e-commerce, consumers would order gifts online for Christmas and they would never appear (at least not till after Dec. 25). Today, online merchants have gotten much closer to perfecting the timely delivery of goods prior to Christmas. Many are guaranteeing regular ground delivery with orders placed as late as Dec. 19.
The fact that online stores have gotten pretty good at making Christmas deliveries on orders placed closer to the holiday has not been lost on consumers who have taken the approach, "Why shop today when you can put it off till tomorrow?" That has meant more sales made closer to Christmas for e-tailers.
"There's no question these sales are going to go right to our bottom line, because we've never been able to get the procrastinators," Shmuel Gniwisch, chief executive of Ice.com told The New York Times. "They always went to the store."
"Everybody gets better at this the longer you stay in business," he added. "You work out the kinks."
John Thomson, a senior vice president at BestBuy.com, saw two primary reasons behind his company's ability to deliver gifts without rush charges closer to the holiday. The first is BestBuy.com's ability to process and move goods through its system and the second is better coordination with the United Postal Service (U.P.S.) to get products where they need to go.
"The Friday after Thanksgiving was a huge day for us, and because we share forecast information with U.P.S., we knew we had the right size trucks - and enough of them - outside our facilities," he said. "That was huge, and it worked as well as we could've hoped."
Norman Black, a U.P.S. spokesman, said, "We're aggressively trying each year to do more and more for our customers, largely because of e-commerce," Mr. Black said. "As we do, and as our competitors do, customers start to trust you more and more, and that shows up in something as mundane as the date of the last recommended shopping day."
Discussion Questions: Is the ability to order later and still receive goods in time for the holiday a major factor in consumers' decisions to buy online? How has/will the improvement in making deliveries closer to Christmas affect consumer shopping behavior and the percentage of sales made online and in physical stores?