The long list of holidays spanning the fourth quarter is what propels many ecommerce companies into the new year ahead. Those final three months on the calendar are crammed with sales, customers, and mad dashes to get everything out of the warehouse and into the hands of happy people on time.
The end of the year not only gets ecommerce stores scrambling, but it also stirs up shoppers. People spend months scouring online stores for the best gifts, and that’s where Zest comes in. As the only online gifting platform built for ecommerce brands, we have our proverbial thumb on the pulse of people sending gifts on the internet.
When shoppers visit one of our brand partners with the mission to send one gift to their sister on the other coast or their squad of employees scattered across the US, our team has a prime vantage point for understanding who, how, and what consumers gift.
So, what is the state of gifting? How did the 2024 holiday season unfold when it comes to sending personalized presents from the world wide web? Take a glimpse through our eyes as we unwrap what people gifted, when they gifted, how much they gifted, and more of the trends that popped up this past season.
A Quick 2024 Holiday Recap
The 2024 holiday shopping season is barely a memory, and ecommerce experts are still busy crunching the numbers. It was kind of a weird year given the fact that there were fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, forcing consumers to get everything with five fewer days than 2023. Despite the shortage of shopping days, many predictions for how the 2024 holidays would pan out were still bigger than ever and some of the stats are already in.
Before dipping into the trends and tactics seen by Zest, let’s recap some of the year’s Q4 highlights.
Roll that beautiful gift footage:
- People are starting their holiday shopping earlier, but only 10% had checked every gift off their list by early December.
- Even if they got a head start in person, 49% of people planned to finish their holiday shopping online.
- Despite brands offering discounts earlier because of the shortened shopping season, 197 million people in the US still shopped throughout Cyber 5, the five days between .
- The number of people who shopped during Cyber 5 was 7.4% higher than the National Retail Federation estimated and is the second-highest figure to date.
- Nearly 90% of shoppers bought gifts during Cyber 5, spending $235 on them, which is slightly up from 2023.
- People who planned to shop for gifts exclusively online was up 2% over 2023, or roughly 8 million people.
- Super Saturday, the last Saturday before Christmas, is becoming an increasingly popular shopping day with an estimated 157.2 million people taking advantage of last-minute deals this year.
- So far, it’s estimated that holiday spending hit record levels up to $989 billion, up 3.5% from 2023, from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31.
- The 2024 holidays broke ecommerce records (and expectations) as US shoppers spent $241.4 billion online, an 8.7% YoY increase.
In the world of ecommerce, it’s likely that your inbox is already being hammered with articles and in-depth analyses poking and prodding every reason for the stacked numbers. We’ll leave the broader ecommerce breakdown to others, but these are our main takeaways:
- Holiday spending continues to grow year over year.
- More of that spending is happening online.
If you’re running an online store, what are you doing to snag more consumers going online to buy gifts?
Zest’s Top Features of 2024 for Optimal Holiday Gifting
Online shopping has been steadily growing for decades, with the internet nabbing a slightly larger share of sales from brick-and-mortar stores each year. With the dawn of the pandemic, though, more consumers than ever were forced into ecommerce shopping and they haven’t looked back.
Ecommerce has essentially become a holiday tradition in itself, even outside of inherently online Cyber Monday. The fact that half of shoppers had a plan to wrap up their gift-buying online well into December is proof that buying online gifts is increasingly common, and Zest prepared to meet these emerging consumer trends all year long.
The brands we’ve partnered with have also read the writing on the wall: more people are buying gifts online and we need to be ready with a better experience.
Our goal at Zest is simple. Every feature added to the online gifting platform is to help our brands optimize their gift checkout and streamline their internal gift processing to achieve the ultimate goal of selling more gifts.
To make this holiday season as fruitful as possible, Zest rolled out a number of heavy-hitting features built to create better brand experiences and cater to every type of gifter.
Zest’s 2024 Feature Release Roundup
Concierge
The steps to placing a huge corporate gift order for the holidays have been the same for a long time: go to a brand’s site, scroll to the footer to see if there’s a “corporate gifting” link, fill out a contact form, wait for a response, and endure weeks of back-and-forth with a bogged down corporate sales person to hammer out the details.
This is a friction-filled and time-consuming process for the gifter and the brand, and it keeps many people from making the gift purchase and many brands from offering the service at all.
Zest’s new Concierge gifting feature expedites the whole back-and-forth process and automates the most tedious parts. When a brand has Zest Concierge at their fingertips, they can build a gift order, spin up an invoice, and process an order in minutes — not weeks.
Alex Ingram, Zest's CEO and co-founder, knows how crucial it is to stay flexible when it comes to customer experience, especially today. “One of our core beliefs is that different customers want different gift-buying experiences. But for brands, accommodating unique gifting journeys is a time-intensive, high-labor effort that’s prone to error without the right tools.”
If fickle gifters change their mind or want to negotiate a deal even further, products and prices can be customized on the fly. Address collection is streamlined with easy upload links, and validation happens instantly so shipping errors are a thing of the past.
Once an order is submitted, all the details are processed automatically (no more manual order entry) and the gifter gets gift statuses and tracking updates every step of the way. Concierge breaks down the barriers for brands wanting to scale their high-touch gifting services, especially during peak holiday corporate gifting time, and greatly expands the number of people they can serve.
“One of our core beliefs is that different customers want different gift-buying experiences. But for brands, accommodating unique gifting journeys is a time-intensive, high-labor effort that’s prone to error without the right tools.”
— Alex Ingram, CEO & Co-founder, Zest
White label storefronts
Online brands spend a lot of time and money on their site’s customer experience. The images, colors, and overall branding are a big draw for shoppers, which is why we made the switch from Zest-branded gifting storefronts to brand-centric storefronts.
In lieu of seeing Zest’s logo and branding on the storefront, brands using Zest now see their logo at the top of the page, their brand name in the URL, and their colors, images, and branded settings throughout the page.
Things like a branded storefront, custom domain, and branded transactional emails ensure the gifting experience looks and feels like the rest of a brand’s purchasing DTC purchasing experience, which is just what you need to ensure smooth sailing for shoppers.
Bulk ship storefronts
Zest had perfected the power to send gifts to many addresses in a single checkout, but there was an increasing trend of gifters needing to send many gifts to a single address.
Whether they needed to send branded gifts to a conference or wedding favors to a ballroom in Brooklyn, these types of gift orders were falling through the cracks until Zest built a bulk ship feature.
Now brands can give their shoppers an easy path to send gifts in bulk to one location without needing loads of lead time or ongoing back-and-forth.
Klaviyo integration
Zest's Klaviyo integration allows brands to sync their customer data and gift order information so they can craft personalized marketing campaigns and provide a more tailored gifting experience.
Just like classic email marketing strategies stuffed with relevant promotions, product drops, and nudges to purchase, this integration lets brands run the same critical playbook for their high-value customers sending gifts online.
With the smarts of Klaviyo behind the post-gifting experience, brands can better understand their gifters' preferences and behaviors, leading to increased customer loyalty and higher gift sales.
By leveraging the power of Klaviyo's advanced segmentation and automation tools, brands can deliver hyper-targeted gift recommendations and promotions, driving more conversions during the critical holiday season.
Customizations via Add-ons
The ability to add a custom touch to a gift is a game-changer for online gifting. This 2024 Zest feature lets brand partners tack an Add-ons section onto their gifting storefront, just below the catalog of products.
This is where brands offer things like custom gift wrap, a handwritten card, things with logos printed on them, and neat merch. Instead of one-size-fits-all gifting, this feature gives gifters the power to add as much a la carte customization as they want.
Address validation
When sending online gifts directly to a bunch of addresses, a common anxiety crops up: the fear that some of the addresses are wrong. For people uploading hundreds of addresses, this is especially worrisome because it’s easy for typos and missing details to go unnoticed.
This feature ensures instant and automatic address validation so that gifters can clear up any shipping issues well before getting a gift with “return to sender” stamped on the box.
Customers are constantly evolving, and the trend of buying gifts online is only growing by the year. The experience of buying gifts online has stood still for decades and forced countless people through an unpleasant and time-consuming back-and-forth process.
Zest is in tune with modern consumer behaviors and what brands need to bring their gifting experience up to speed. These features were some of the most impactful for ensuring each of our partners could give premium gift-buying experiences and sell more with fewer resources during the 2024 holiday season.
So, how did these features play out?
Zest’s Top Online Gifting Trends of the 2024 Holiday Shopping Season
As mentioned earlier, Zest has its ear to the ground when it comes to online gifting. We notice changing trends both in a single year and year-over-year so we can plan our roadmap and give tips to our partners so they can leverage this intel.
So, after crunching some stats of our own, here are a few of our favorite numbers:
- New brands onboarded: +50% YoY
Modern online brands are realizing the potential of gifting as a sales channel and more are investing in this experience on their websites.
- GMV YoY growth: +479% YoY
The 2024 gross merchandise value of gifts our brand partners have processed through Zest compared with 2023.
- Average Brand GMV: +300% YoY
Of course the total GMV would grow as our brand count grew. Taking that into consideration, the average GMV per brand also increased.
Consumer trends in online gifting
- Shopping started a whole month earlier in 2024.
- In 2023, holiday gift orders started picking up in the final week of October. In 2024, gifting momentum started a whole month earlier and started ticking upward during the first week of September.
- Monday was the most popular weekday to buy gifts.
- Wednesday was a close second.
- Friday was the least popular day to buy gifts.
- The weekends were pretty quiet throughout the holiday season, including Super Saturday.
- Gifters chose shipping gifts directly to an address vs. e-gifting 6-to-1.
- But during the week of Christmas, that ratio shifted and consumers selected e-gifting just as often as shipping gifts directly. E-gifting is great for extending sales windows and snagging last-minute shoppers who send gifts instantly with e-gifting.
- Cookies were the most popular gift.
- Out of the top 20 products gifted, 12 of those involved cookies.
- Cheese, charcuterie boards, steak, chocolate, cake, and olive oil rounded out the rest of the top 20.
- Concierge gifting was the preferred experience before Black Friday, while self-service gifting was the preferred experience after Black Friday.
- Self-service storefronts are great for converting gifters who've procrastinated and might not have time to reach out to a brand and wait for a response. They simply want to get in and get gifting within minutes.
- Brands leaned more into marketing their gifting services.
- They sent more emails with gifting CTAs, like this example stuffed to the gills from Levain Bakery.
- They set up landing pages highlighting different ways to send gifts, like Milk Bar's corporate gifting page.
- They increased traffic by putting more CTAs in more places, like Graza's multi-ship CTA on product pages.
- South Carolina, California, and Wyoming were the most generous states as they proportionately sent more gifts than they received.
- Recipients appreciated thoughtful gifts and showed thanks with heartfelt notes!
Online Gifting and Ecommerce Trends to Look for in 2025
Zooming out, the numbers put up this year paint a clear picture of the future of ecommerce and its place in holiday shopping. In a nutshell, consumers are going to continue heading online to wrap up their gifting, and more brands are building customer journeys to meet them.
Innovative brands can capture and convert many of these gift-hungry shoppers if they make the online gifting experience a frictionless and fast process for both shoppers and in-house teams.
By erasing the need for lengthy conversations, formal-feeling contact forms, clunky (or nonexistent) multiship checkouts, and relatively opaque processes, online stores can leverage this growing yet underserved cohort of consumers.
In the year ahead, Zest is going to continue fine-tuning existing features while introducing new brand-centric ones that simplify the process of buying gifts online. Gifting is a massively lucrative channel when done well, “well” meaning finding ways to eliminate time-consuming tasks and provide seamless buying experiences to shoppers. With Zest, all of that is possible.
We’re already ramping up plans for 2025 and have our sights set on helping more ecommerce brands convert high-value gifters for all occasions throughout the year. With Zest on their site, our brand partners unlock entirely new opportunities for who they can engage and convert.
Whether some shopper on the internet wants to buy one gift for a pal on the opposite coast or 50 gifts for new employees or 300 goodies for their upcoming conference giveaways, brands can tackle these orders in just minutes with Zest’s suite of features. By this time next year, they’ll have perfected their gifting flows and built engaging email marketing sequences, enticing bulk gift offers, and a branded experience that puts them top of mind for more gifters shopping online. We can’t wait to see how their year unwraps.
