Survey Finds Nearly 60% of Online Retailers Plan to Start Holiday Promotions in September or Earlier

ChannelAdvisor reveals the holiday results of its 2015 Online Retail Survey

Research Triangle Park, NC – September 9, 2015 – ChannelAdvisor Corporation (NYSE:ECOM), a leading provider of cloud-based e-commerce solutions that enable retailers and manufacturers to increase global sales, today revealed the holiday results of its 2015 Online Retail Survey, a survey of more than 200 U.S. and U.K. retailers. The survey found that nearly 60 percent of respondents plan to start their holiday promotions in September or sooner, and almost a quarter (24 percent) of respondents are planning to offer more holiday promotions than last year as a strategy to increase their 2015 holiday sales.

To view the complete holiday results of the 2015 Online Retail Survey, download the infographic: http://bit.ly/2015HolidayInfographic.

“Retailers continue to push holiday sales earlier and earlier to get in front of the competition,” said ChannelAdvisor Executive Chairman Scot Wingo. “We’ve seen larger retailers kick off their holiday promotions as early as July. It will be interesting to see if consumers respond to early holiday promotions again this year and get out their wallets before Thanksgiving.”

The 2015 Online Retail Survey revealed several key holiday-related findings.

The holiday season is critical to retailers.

• Nearly 75 percent of retailers said 20 percent or more of their annual sales come during the holiday season.

All signs point to another successful holiday season.

• More than 80 percent of retailers expect their 2015 holiday sales to increase from 2014.

Fulfillment is the largest challenge for retailers during the holiday season.

• More than a third (34 percent) of respondents said fulfilling orders on time is their biggest challenge during the holidays, followed by adjusting to competitor activity (27 percent) and converting mobile traffic (19 percent).

ChannelAdvisor commissioned Redshift Research to conduct the 2015 Online Retail Survey. Research was performed using an email invitation and an online survey. All survey respondents were e-commerce decision makers for their respective companies.

For a summary of the 2015 Online Retail Survey results, please visit http://bit.ly/2015OnlineRetailSurvey.

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