Holiday Gifting Trends: Gifts Arriving Weeks Early

Most gifting this week had nothing to do with a date on the calendar. And yet the pile pointed at the calendar kept growing, filled with gifts for festivals and family days that are still weeks out.

Gifting attached to an occasion ran about 1.6 times its recent pace, even though the week overall was quieter than usual. Shoppers were wrapping September in the last week of August.

The slowest week in a month still produced the busiest calendar.

Australia is shopping for Father's Day already

Father's Day lands in Australia and New Zealand on September 6, and shoppers there are not leaving it to the final weekend. Seasonal gifting made up 16% of Australian gifting this week, level with new baby gifts and just behind the country's steady birthday stream.

That is a lot of coffee mugs, watch straps and bottles moving two weeks early. It also lines up with what happened before Father's Day last year in the northern hemisphere: the gifts go out well before the greeting cards do.

For merchants selling into Australia and New Zealand, the practical read is simple. The Father's Day window is open now, not on September 4.

The gifting map is already spread wide

Three festivals sit in the next four weeks, in three different parts of the world: Raksha Bandhan in India on Friday, Father's Day in Australia and New Zealand, and Mid-Autumn Festival in China, South Korea and across East Asia in late September.

The week's gifting looked just as spread out. Nearly six in ten gifts crossed a border, sent from the United States, Britain, Canada, France and the United Arab Emirates, with notes written in Spanish, Turkish, French, Dutch and Arabic alongside English.

Bracelets, books and bottles of wine did most of the travelling. Jewelry shops handled more gifting than any other kind of store, and bracelets and necklaces finished within a whisker of each other, which is a nice problem for anyone deciding what to feature.

Birthdays keep the floor steady

None of this displaced the everyday. Birthday gifting was still the single largest occasion at around a third of everything sent, and in Britain it ran higher still, taking well over half of the country's gifting.

Family members sent more gifts than anyone else, often birthday gifts for children, with parents and grandparents marking another year. Just-because gifts, the ones with no occasion attached at all, made up more than a quarter of the week.

Festivals rise and fall. The birthday floor does not move much, and that is what makes the seasonal bumps easy to spot.

What this means for merchants

Early gifting is a timing problem more than a demand problem. If shoppers are buying two weeks before a date, the gift option needs to be visible at the moment they fall in love with the product, and the message field needs to carry the sentiment forward to the day it is opened.

The second piece is language. With most gifts crossing borders and notes arriving in half a dozen languages, gift options that appear in the shopper's own language remove the last bit of hesitation before checkout. Turn both on before the festivals arrive, not during them.