78% of Retailers to Offer Free Shipping During the Holidays

The National Retail Federation, a leading trade associations for online retailers, released its 2008 eHoliday Study, which found that despite the rocky economy, slightly more than half of respondents anticipated year-over-year sales growth. Shop.org, the online division of the NRF, said that some 56% of online retailers expected to eke out a gain compared to last year.

Not surprisingly, that's down from the 77% who expressed the same view back in Q4 2007.

Retailers were largely united in their intentions to use free shipping offers to help drive sales growth. "Despite an increase in transportation costs, retailers do not plan to cut back on popular free shipping promotions," Shop.org reported. "This year, the majority of retailers (78%) plan to offer free shipping with conditions* at some point during the holiday season, consistent with last year’s levels."

In addition to slashing shipping, retailers planned to roll out a number of enhanced online features and other promotions. Here are the improvements most cited by merchants:

Improved site search: 43%
Product videos: 43%
Customer reviews: 33%
Featured sale pages: 31%
Clearance sale pages: 27%
Experimenting with Facebook or other social networking 25%


The study was conducted in parnership with Shopzilla, the comparison shopping engine.