Free Shipping Day is attracting record interest from retailers

he third part of the holiday shopping trifecta is seeing record interest from retailers. The third annual Free Shipping Day - which is set for Friday, December 17 – has already topped 550 merchants. Luke Knowles, the event’s founder, projects that more than 1,000 retailers will be involved with the one-day shopping event.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become household names in the holiday shopping vocabulary. Free Shipping Day is emerging as a widely known event among cost-conscious consumers during the holiday shopping season.

Free Shipping Day was created to extend the online holiday shopping season for merchants and give procrastinating consumers one final chance to surf the Internet for gifts. Merchants like the event because it extends the online holiday shopping season to almost a week before Christmas. Consumers relish the day because it allows them to procrastinate and still get the ideal gift to its intended destination on time.
So far, 65 percent of the participating retailers will offer free shipping on all deals, Knowles said. “We want this to be an event that gives a lot of savings for consumers and represents significant sales for retailers,” Knowles said. “We are encouraging retailers to offer free shipping on every transaction.”

Knowles - who created the popular shopping web site FreeShipping.org with his wife, Maisie, in 2007 - hatched the idea for Free Shipping Day just two weeks before the event in December 2008. In an abrupt brainstorm, he thought that retailers would relish the opportunity to extend the online holiday shopping season, which typically peaks in early December because consumers are concerned about their gift orders arriving to their intended destination in time for Christmas.

Knowles expected a favorable response from retailers and consumers that first year, but he didn’t anticipate the overwhelming interest that the event actually received. Free Shipping Day attracted more than 250 merchants and the FreeShippingDay.com web site saw 250,000 hits in a 10-day period, including 100,000 on the actual day itself. Word spread among national media outlets and blogs, and last year more than 750 merchants that participated, drawing 450,000 visitors to the website, including 232,000 on Free Shipping Day itself. Knowles estimates that about 35,000 sales were registered on the site among participating retailers on Free Shipping Day last December.

“Since more retailers and more consumers are familiar with Free Shipping Day, we expect to exceed sales and web traffic figures compared to last year,” Knowles said. “We call it the final event in the holiday shopping trifecta because it is gaining so much recognition.”

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Free Shipping Day was created to extend the online holiday shopping season for merchants and give procrastinating consumers one final chance to surf the Internet for gifts. The third annual event will be held this year on Friday, December 17. For more information, visit http://www.freeshippingday.com.


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