Ecommerce, Gifts, and the Biggest Opportunity for Online Brands
Shopping online has become as much a part of the average person’s daily routine as brushing their teeth or walking the dog. It’s second nature to scramble to Amazon when you need this thing or that thing in no time flat, and window shopping as a pastime is now a matter of scrolling through Instagram and saving posts to wishlists.
The boundaries that ecommerce has pushed and the norms the industry has set in such a brief amount of time is nothing short of gobsmacking — and it’s just getting started.
Artificial intelligence, deeper personalization, and continuously trying to digitize analog shopping experiences and retrofit them in an online world are all ways this ecosystem keeps expanding around us.
Despite the strides ecommerce has taken, there’s still a glaring opportunity laying on the table: online gifting. This channel is up for grabs, and brands that take advantage of it today are going to be the ones that stay on top. But what does that look like (and why has this treasure been left relatively untouched for so long)? Let’s find out.
Ecommerce Has Evolved (Which Is Good News for Gifting)
A Very Brief History of Ecommerce
Toward the end of the 20th century, the world wide web was just booting up. It was a portal beyond the books and resources that were tangibly within reach, a new way for people to communicate and share information globally, and a milestone for humankind. To say that possibilities seemed endless is an understatement.
In 1994, a copy of Sting’s album “Ten Summoner’s Tales” was sold online, marking the first secure online credit card transaction and the birth of ecommerce as we know it. It’s been 30 years since that fateful day. Skeptics of ecommerce’s worth have been hushed, and the proof of the channel’s popularity is all around us.
TV ads point people to their online counterparts. Social media is evolving to accommodate seamless interaction with shoppable sites. And people continue to choose shopping from their smartphone over brick-and-mortar stores again and again. Ecommerce has adapted from the days of dialup and works dynamically with the other parts of our modern lives.
Gen Z and Millennials Are Going to Keep Driving Sales Up and Up
Ecommerce has really outdone itself year after year, and by 2027, global sales are expected to crest $8 trillion. More people than ever are logging on to complete their personal shopping. Ecommerce has become a go-to for buying everything from electronics and clothes to hardware tools and hobby supplies — especially for the younger shoppers among us.
Millennials and Gen Z are the generations least likely to shop in-store and most likely to prefer online shopping, which is no surprise since these generations grew up with access to the internet and the concept of ecommerce was the norm.
Gen Z, although comprised of some pretty young members, is starting to come into its spending power. Members of the Gen Z club currently spend more per person than any other generation at the same age, and 68% of them spend some of that dough by shopping on their phones up to four times per week.
Younger generations grew up in heavily digital worlds. The internet is a presence that plays a part in how they consume media, research topics, share stories, interact with peers, and, of course, shop.
We’re Growing Past Personal Shopping
The swell of popularity isn’t a surprise, though. For online consumers, they prefer ecommerce because the stores are open 24/7 and the convenience can’t be beat. In short, if you have an internet connection, the sprawling world of ecommerce is accessible.
For decades, both brands and their shoppers have been adapting to one another and building the ecommerce ecosystem we know today.
The past few years have been nothing short of formative. We see ecommerce outgrowing infancy and sprinting into maturity. The US has the second-largest ecommerce market in the world, and by 2029, more than 97% of consumers are expected to dabble in online shopping. This shows that we’re well-adapted to ecommerce.
As a whole, consumers understand ecommerce. The experience is pretty intuitive. The process of shopping to checking out to tracking is mostly universal across stores. We trust enough online brands to go through with online transactions.
And now, shoppers are ready to mature from making relatively smaller purchases for just themselves to making larger purchases for others. They’re ready to tap ecommerce for more of their gift-sending needs.
Historically, Online Gifting Sucks
Since that fateful day in 1994, ecommerce has seen an explosive amount of innovation. Companies like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Squarespace were created solely to power online stores and make this venture accessible to any and all entrepreneurs.
With a website up and functioning, it became painfully clear that more parts of the ecommerce funnel needed some help. Every aspect of ecommerce, from product imagery and marketing emails to checkout options and package tracking, has been solved for by thousands of apps and platforms that tweak, optimize, and continue innovating the industry.
With the basics finally down pat and shoppers feeling mostly content with their online experiences, a new need is making itself know — online gifting. As in, someone wants to send a product to one or tons of people. Seems simple enough, right? Just apply all the modern ecommerce amenities we just talked about to an expanded checkout experience?
Wrong.
People who want to buy something for anyone but themselves are met with an agonizing experience. Whether this is someone looking send gifts to faraway family, long-distance lovers, or huge swaths of coworkers and clients as part of the booming $300 billion corporate gifting industry, there hasn’t been an easy path to purchase.
Friction, Confusion, Frustration, BYE
Despite dumping loads of time and resources into smoothing out every last wrinkle in personal online shopping, gifting has been riddled with friction. Ecommerce today has been built from the ground up with one prompt: How do we make it easy for shoppers to buy something for themselves?
And so far, the industry has been heeding that question well as evidenced by the immense adoption of online shopping. (If ecommerce wasn’t making it easy for people to buy for themselves, well, the whole industry probably would have gone the way of dialup and floppy discs, eh?)
When it comes to buying products as gifts for people, though, the process looks…a little different. Here’s the typical experience:
- If you want to send a gift to one other person, you have to ship the gift directly to them, which means knowing their current address. If you don’t have their address stashed in your Rolodex, you have to spend time sleuthing around to find it or, unfortunately, you have to ask them for their address and risk ruining the surprise.
You could also ship the gift to yourself and dodge the address question entirely, but then the onus is still on you to get that gift to them. If they don’t live nearby, that means spending time packaging the gift and paying another shipping fee. And if something goes awry in this step, the brand you bought isn’t going to help with returns or refunds.
- If you want to send a gift to lots of other people, you have to go through the checkout for every transaction on top of having to know and manually add every single address.
Alternatively, you could go for the latter option from the bullet before this one and have a mountain of products shipped directly to you. Then again, you’ll also be responsible for boxing up and shipping even more gifts now.
- If you want even minor personalization or customization, you have to settle for a simple gift message (which you’ll have to write over and over again when trying to send gifts directly to multiple people) or, more often than not, you’re stuck with no personalization at all. So, what do you do?
You have to contact the company you want to buy gifts from. You have to fill out a form, send an email, or (gasp!) make a phone call to try and coordinate your gift. This process could take days, weeks, or even months — and do you always have all the time in the world to do that? No, you do not.
- You know a place that has gift note personalization and e-gifting, so you go there! It’s true that there are gifting marketplaces out there. Companies like Sendoso, Reachdesk, and Goody have been tackling the multi-recipient gift conundrum for a hot minute. These marketplaces have ways for gifters to browse a variety of presents and deliver them to one or many recipients via text, email, link, or good ol’ snail mail — at a cost.
These marketplaces can be cost-prohibitive, often requiring huge upfront platform fees or monthly subscription fees for gifters to access a full suite of gifts and features. What’s more is that the cost per gift is typically higher than if one were to buy the same item directly from the brand’s website.
- You give up and just buy a dang Amazon gift card, sacrificing thoughtfulness and personalization because the options for online gifting were just too unpleasant.
Walking a mile in the typical gifter’s shoes shines a huge 80 billion-lumen spotlight on one of ecommerce’s biggest oversights. Buying for yourself is easy. Buying gifts for others is a nightmare. The brands that can fix it are going to be the ones coming out on top.
The Biggest Opportunity for Ecommerce Brands in 2025
A better gifting experience is the biggest opportunity fro ecommerce brands in 2025.
In your online brand’s journey, you’ve pored over every last detail from website copy to on-site experiences to post-purchase engagement. Every touchpoint has been perfected for the consumer shopping for themself, but they’re hungry to integrate ecommerce even deeper into their shopping habits and leverage it for their gifting needs.
In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic spurred a wave of connecting with others in new ways. From 2019 to 2020, Google searches for “online gift” shot up 80% as people sought to celebrate loved ones, friends, and coworkers from a distance, and it’s trend that has persisted since then.
Sure, days like Cyber Monday and Black Friday stand out massive gifting events for online brands, and that isn’t changing. But just how the pandemic changed ecommerce consumer behaviors in most regards, gifting is no different. “Marketers need to expand their gifting strategy beyond special dates” and consider new emotional motivations behind gifting, according to Google Consumer Insights.
“Now that so much of this gift shopping is happening online, brands have ample opportunity to use consumer signals of intent to better tailor both their messaging and product offerings,” and, might we add, improve their store’s gifting experience.
During the pandemic, many consumers leapt into online shopping for the first time ever, and others who had been shopping online already increased their reliance. Now it’s the brands’ turn to take note of the trends, rethink what gifting can look like, and meet the needs and wants of their customers.
Zest Gifting Platform Is Here to Help Brands Reimagine Gifting
Zest was co-founded by two guys, Alex and Jeremy, after chatting with some friends at a get-together who were lamenting about the plight of buying a gift online. Knowing their address, limited personalization, inability to schedule anything — all of the usual complaints were present. So, they set out to change it.
The neverending growth of ecommerce, up-and-coming digital-first Gen Z shoppers, increasing asks about gifting — all the signals are pointing to the fact that modern consumers are more than ready for an online gifting solution. Zest is empowering online brands to meet those needs and tap into gifting as their most lucrative sales channel.
Imagine a world where your store’s gifting experience is as fluid as the personal shopping CX:
- Increase average order value (AOV)
Gift orders are typically larger than a personal purchase. Corporate gift orders can easily add up to thousands of dollars in one transaction. If your store makes it easier to place these large orders, expect more of them to roll in.
- Increase customer loyalty
Competing for online customers is one of the toughest games to win. No matter what you sell, there is a competitor always lurking just a click away. Adding an easy, intuitive, and optimized gifting experience to your website, though, is one way to stand out. When you offer your shoppers a quick, digital-first way to send your products as gifts to one or many people in minutes, you can bet they’ll return to your store for the same slick CX for all their gifting needs.
- Increase brand awareness
Word-of-mouth marketing is one the most powerful and hard-to-master tactics in ecommerce. Ninety-two percent of people trust recommendations from people they know as these come off as genuine, authentic (read: not sleezy and salesy) thoughts.
When someone gives your goods as a gift, it’s a glowing endorsement. Not only does the recipient trust they’re getting a quality item from the gifter, but it’s an opportunity for them to feel, touch, hold, and use the item, and eventually head to your company to get some more.
Gifting is a foolproof way to amplify your brand, get your products in the paws of more people, and appeal to a heap of new potential customers (all without blowing your marketing budget).
- Unlock new customer insights
Without a doubt, a portion of your customers are currently sending your products as gifts. The problem? You have zero insights to take away. The only gifts you truly have details around are the ones your team has manually processed, but if your customer forged through the friction and tackled their gift order on their own, you’re left in the dark.
With a dedicated self-service gifting storefront on your site, you can capture details around your most popular gifts, why people gift, when people gift, who’s gifting, and who’s receiving. This is a well of intel you can use to reimagine your marketing, messaging, and on-site personalization. Just like how you re-engage shoppers to buy a pair of pants they might like, you’ll have a whole new audience to re-engage around any gifting occasion.
Get the gist?
Today’s shoppers are hungry for a better way to buy gifts online, and Zest is hungry to help your store meet the demand. The gifting opportunity has gone unrealized — until now.
Jump on the Gifting Opportunity and Join Innovative Brands Changing Ecommerce
Ecommerce has always evolved to meet consumer trends. Since the day that infamous Sting CD was bought and sold online, the evolution of ecommerce experiences has closely aligned with how people are shopping.
With more choices than ever at their fingertips, savvy consumers can click just about anywhere to make a purchase. When a brand provides them not only with the products they want but also with the easy, convenient experience they expect, that brand has won a customer for life.
We’ve seen all the signals, we’ve watched the trends, and everything is culminating to one undeniable truth: online gifting is the biggest untapped opportunity for ecommerce brands.
Famously innovative brands like Milk Bar, Graza, Levain Bakery, and Brightland have already started to unlock the potential of gifting as a channel with the help of Zest. Are you ready to join them and lead a new era of ecommerce?
