Did Free Shipping Day Do the Trick for Small Biz?


The Results


This year’s holiday shopping season has gone a long way to bring consumer spending back to life. Free Shipping Day saw $1.07 billion alone in sales.

And it’s our hope that small businesses benefited. The proof will come next year — when you consider whether small retailers will participate in 2012.



With sales up 19% over 2010’s Free Shipping Day, this year seems to be a success. Retailers who participated got a little more attention and traffic to their sites, and they got new customers who, hopefully will buy from them again.

 

3 Comments ▼

Susan Payton Susan Payton is the Communications Manager for the Small Business Trends Awards programs. She is the President of Egg Marketing & Communications, an Internet marketing firm specializing in content marketing, social media management and press releases. She is also the Founder of How to Create a Press Release, a free resource for business owners who want to generate their own PR.

3 Reactions
  1. Love the positive press and let’s hope that some of that money got down to SMBs, not just the big ecoommerce sites.

  2. How big part is the shipping of the total amount of online sales? Do you have a general rule of thumb as a percentage figure? Adlibris is an online book (in the Nordic countries) seller that is giving away free shipping as standard practice. They have done it for a long time, as an extra value included in the general business transaction.

  3. So, did Free Shipping Day help small businesses? I am not sure we will have hard proof of it one way or the other, anytime soon.

    It’s hard to tell the exact dollar benefits for small businesses. Large corporations report their sales for a variety of reasons — not the least of which is that some companies are public and so report their numbers for analysts and legal reasons. It’s much harder to get data for a large group of small businesses. I think we’re reduced to looking at blogs and case studies after the fact – to see if any retailers report successes.

    Or we’ll see the impact indirectly next year, if this thing grows in 2012.