With only a few days left until Christmas Eve, 2021’s end-of-year holiday shopping season is here. During the 2020 holidays at this time, people around the world were restricted in their ways of buying holiday gifts for loved ones, and the same may apply this year. So both businesses and consumers will still have to make a lot of adjustments, even for this year's holiday plans.
The holiday shopping season starts with Cyber/Black Week, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and runs through until the holiday sales at the beginning of January.
How much shopping will people do during the holidays?
It’s hard to say, but one thing is for sure, online shopping is the way to go.
According to Klarna, a Swedish payment and shopping service for e-commerce sites, 87% of those who shopped mostly online during last years holiday will do so again this year. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to have a functional e-commerce site. As a result, e-commerce is expected to grow, despite increased access to physical stores in Sweden during this holiday shopping season.
Consumers have learned to shop online, for real, and will stick to it. 
Most popular Christmas gifts in Sweden 2021
What do people want in a Christmas gift? One of the top product categories, regardless of age, is electronics.
Klarna saw that sales of electronics increased by 694% on Black Friday, 122% on Cyber Monday and 262% during Black Week last year, compared to an average day in November. On Cyber Monday, its jewellery and accessories increase the most in sales.
Just like last year, it’s gift cards and money that come close after on the Swedes’ wishlists.
Postnord
Postnord has increased the opening hours for customer service to manage this year’s Christmas deliveries, introduced deliveries on Saturdays in big parts of the country, Sunday sorting of packages, 40 temporary Christmas agents, and extra staffing.
The Christmas gift of the year: The event ticket
A few weeks ago, HUI released that this year’s Christmas gift is the event ticket. Something one might think is a bold choice given that we’re still living in a pandemic where the future is unclear. However, we can only hope that it will be possible to use the event tickets, under certain circumstances during 2022.
Last years Christmas gift was the Camping Kitchen, a result of the Corona pandemic and people spending more time outside, in nature.
Trends to watch during the 2021 holiday shopping season in Sweden:
BOPIS
BOPIS (Buy online, pick up in-store) is a business model that allows consumers to place orders online and then pick up their purchases in the bricks & mortar store. BOPIS has grown strongly during the pandemic, and there is no indication that it’s something that would decrease in the near future.
Mobile payments
Over the past years, mobile apps have increased in popularity. Mobile apps convert 157% more than a mobile web session. Even mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Android Pay have increased.
Sustainable shopping
Production and delivery are more important for consumers from a sustainability perspective. Many customers want better insight into the production chain. Offer your customers full traceability in the supply chain. Customers can then see where everything is manufactured, produced and where it comes from. This is in order to meet consumers’ demands and ever-increasing expectations.
Take part in the holiday spirit, with the help of automated online merchandising.
Be more productive and save time by automating your online merchandising.
Online merchandising, carried out manually, can never deliver the sales growth required to justify retailers’ huge investment in driving quality traffic to their online stores. It has too many limitations.
There are simply not enough merchandisers out there, nor hours in the day, to effectively analyse the huge amounts of customer and product data required to optimise product exposure in real-time across catalogues running to tens of thousands of products.
What you need is a system powered by AI and machine learning and predictive analytics based on customer behavioural data, context and crowd wisdom. It presents each shopper with the most relevant selection of products, ordered in an optimum way to maximise sales.
We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
We're looking forward to a new year!
