As cold weather approaches, it is important to take a few preventative measures to protect your home through the chilly months. Winterizing is generally a task that can be done relatively inexpensively, but will make a big difference in how comfortable your home is, and could end up saving you money on energy bills, too. In fact, many very effective home weatherproofing jobs are something that homeowners can complete without professional help.

Easy Home Weatherproofing
Some small weatherproofing jobs require little to no “handiness,” but can make a real difference once cold weather hits. By doing these things before the snow flies, you’ll be saving yourself some hassle (and possibly some money, too!):

• Clean gutters and downspouts in mid-fall and double-check them before winter.
• Replace the filter in your furnace.
• Close any vents in your home that may have been opened for the warm weather.
• Disconnect hoses from outside faucets and turn off the water.
• Buy a snow shovel and other winter supplies before the messy weather hits.
• Keep extra water and canned food in storage just in case.
• Test your heating system, so that you know it will work properly when you need it.
• Give your deck a fresh coat of sealer to protect it from the winter elements.

During the 2017 holiday shopping season, expect weather, mobile commerce, and self-gifting to contribute to an 18 percent growth in U.S. digital retail sales.

For the last few years, we have made annual predictions for the holidays. We are far from perfect, but we have been correct quite a bit. We are taking a risk with our fourth prediction this year: an 18 percent growth in ecommerce sales. Do you think we will be right?

1. Winter Weather Will Impact Holiday Retail Sales

Brick-and-mortar retailers have long understood how much weather impacts sales. Demand for umbrellas always goes up when it rains.

Long-range weather forecasts suggest that the days leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday may be colder than last year. Weather Trends, a service that predicts weather for retailers and other businesses, is reporting that Thanksgiving Day may be six degrees cooler than last year in the northeastern United States and nearly 20 degrees cooler than last year in the north-central portion of the nation.

While the first chill of winter is often good for brick-and-mortar retailers, a cool Black Friday might encourage some shoppers to go online instead of driving to a big box store.

2. 25 Percent of U.S. Ecommerce Sales Will Come From Mobile

There is a mobile ecommerce gap. A majority of American shoppers spend more time online on a mobile device than they do on a desktop or laptop computer. Nonetheless, as a group, ecommerce shoppers are significantly more likely to make purchases from a laptop or desktop system.

Why? Because too many online stores don’t provide a good mobile shopping experience. When retailers can make it just as easy to find and buy products on a small, touch screen, ecommerce will become mobile commerce.

Enterprise retailers like Amazon are the first to really make mobile commerce work. So they will be the ones enjoying the sales growth in November and December.

For the 2017 holiday shopping season, we think mobile commerce sales will account for 25 percent of all U.S. digital sales.

3. Self-Gifting Will Be Big

Not every “holiday” purchase from Halloween to Christmas is a gift for someone else. About 70 percent of shoppers admit that they bought a gift or two for themselves during the holiday season last year, according to the National Retail Federation.

So-called self-gifting is not new. Retailers have seen the trend for years. But in 2017, organizations, including the aforementioned NRF, are encouraging retail business to market at self-gifters.

“Self-gifters are also open to recommendations; retailers should create calls to action for shoppers to ‘treat themselves.’ One common self-gifting strategy is to offer bonuses with gift cards and holiday purchases,” the NRF reported in its 2017 Retail Holiday Planning Playbook. Given this encouragement (and early reminder) from the NRF, we expect more retailers to make self-gifting offers and promote self-gifting in advertising.

4. Ecommerce Sales Will Grow 18 Percent

Some in the retail industry are suggesting that U.S. ecommerce sales may slow a bit in 2017 relative to previous years. As an example, eMarketer predicted that digital holiday sales would increase about 15.8 percent this year, compared to a 17 percent increase in 2016.

We are a bit more optimistic. In our opinion, enterprise ecommerce merchants have done a good job of creating mobile shopping experiences (see prediction 1.), helping to fuel ecommerce sales this Christmas.

What’s more, large traditional retailers like Walmart are trying to boost ecommerce sales in order to compete with Amazon, possibly pushing more shoppers online.

Article courtesy of Practicalecommerce.com

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