Free Shipping Day hopes to lure online shoppers
With the unprecedented success in Canada this year of the U.S.-created retail shopping incentives Black Friday and Cyber Monday, a newer contender, Free Shipping Day, is aiming to woo Canadians to shop online Dec. 12.
If you have not heard of it, this is only the second year the promotion has been running in this country, but Luke Knowles, the Regina native who created the U.S. promotion in 2008, believes it will readily pick up given the record sales in Canada this year on the two U.S. shopping holidays.
Free Shipping Day in the U.S. now includes more 2,600 participating merchants, up from 250 in its first year.
But in Canada, prohibitive or hidden shipping costs have long been a sore point among Canadian online shoppers and have been cited frequently as a key deterrent to buying goods online at all.
“In Canada the shipping costs are a nightmare,” said Knowles. “It is harder to ship in Canada because of the geog- raphy — it takes much longer to ship items.”
A 2009 PayPal survey found that 56 per cent of online shoppers in Canada had abandoned their online shopping carts because of higher-than-expected shipping charges.
“Things seem to be changing a lot in Canada,” said Knowles. “Online shopping is really picking up.”
In Canada, 142 merchants including Sport Chek, Roots, Indigo, Sears and Reitmans have joined Free Shipping Day and those participating have agreed to deliver items ordered on Dec. 12 by Christmas Eve.
Despite the name, however, free shipping day is not necessarily free. Promoters encourage merchants to offer free shipping with no minimum order, though some simply lower their minimums. Last year more than half of the merchants who participated offered shipping with no minimum, Knowles said.
Black Friday, a U.S. retail tradition that has been widespread there since the 1970s marking the day after U.S. Thanksgiving when retailers hold deep discount sales, was adopted by more Canadian re- tailers than ever before this year. Consumers took the bait — Canadian retailers’ Black Friday sales in stores and online were up 6.5 per cent this year compared with the same day in 2011, according to data from Moneris Solutions, Canada’s largest debit and credit card processor.
The following “Cyber Monday,” a day invented in 2005 by the U.S. National Retail Federation’s online division Shop.org, saw even bigger gains this year in Canada, with consumers in this country spending 22.5 per cent more than they did in 2011 on online bargains.
The success of Dec. 12’s free shipping promotion could depend, however, on how a rival promotion, “No Minimum Monday,” fares. The Canadian website bargainmoose.ca promises a free delivery on Monday Dec. 10 without a mention of guaranteed delivery by Christmas.
Bargainmoose has listed many of the same retailers offering deals on Free Shipping Day, but is also linked to a number of brands that always offer free shipping on their items, including Dyson and Lenovo.