A Reflection on the 2021 Holiday Season: What Businesses Can Learn from the Trends and Spending Patterns of Last Year

With the holiday shopping season behind us, we can now finally take a breather, reflect on yet another year of uneasiness for consumers navigating the ever changing payments landscape and look ahead to the emerging trends of 2022.

The 2021 holiday shopping season was marked with supply chain shortages, increased freight prices, labor scarcity, inflation and yet another strain of COVID-19. On top of all that, as the world continues to adapt to an increasingly digital environment, security breaches are on the rise and threaten to wreak havoc on brand integrity.

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Putting your best foot forward pays off.

These disruptions prompted retailers to expedite their typical timeline, pushing deals to customers much earlier than usual to ensure products were in stock and ready to go for the holidays. 

Retailers truly did their best to appease customers and fulfill the demand for inventory. For example, big retail names like Best Buy, GameStop and Bed, Bath & Beyond, all opened their doors early on Black Friday to give consumers a head start. The industry’s efforts didn’t go unnoticed, at least financially. To many people’s surprise, spending was not dampened by the Omnicron surge. In fact, retail sales in the US, November through December grew 14.1% over 2020 to $886.7 billion.

Rising online sales and security concerns.

As excited as shoppers were to experience a modicum of normalcy, they were far from blinded from the turbulent security landscape. 2021 teemed with new data breaches each day, the ramifications of which continue to leak into 2022, like Log4j. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center’s recent data breach analysis, by September 30, 2021 there were already 17% more data breach events than 2020 as a whole.

In fact, according to experts from the Data Breach Industry Forecast, the cyber threat landscape will continue to be heavily influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic with bad actors using the spread of the virus to their advantage. This year has already been deemed the “Cyberdemic 2.0.”

As a result, consumers are overwhelmed and unsure about how to proceed when it comes to retail. Companies are advised to evaluate and learn from consumer behavior in order to prepare their businesses for the future.

It’s can be a scary world out there.

There isn’t a more vulnerable time for hackers to attack than during the holidays when consumers are spending on a multitude of sites, creating new log-ins, and entering their personal data. With the uptick in eCommerce, cyber criminals are like kids in a candy store. According to a 2021 holiday shopping survey, 77.3% of consumers had grown more concerned by the uptick in cyberattacks and fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic, becoming more curious to how companies were handling personal data during this shopping season. This is indicative of the need for more transparency when it comes to security practices moving forward.

Consumers aren’t shopping just anywhere.

With increased skepticism this season, it wasn’t surprising that the same survey indicated that 40% of consumers said they wouldn’t shop with a brand that had been subject to a data breach in the last year. And, 43.3% of consumers said they would stick to where they feel comfortable and only shop with familiar retailers. This puts even more pressure on retailers to maintain high levels of consumer trust. 

Online continues to reign supreme.

The pandemic has really bolstered eCommerce’s strength in the industry, and in-person sales will likely never return to where they once were. In fact, U.S. consumers spent $204.5 billion on eCommerce purchases during this holiday season, resulting in an 8.6% year over year increase in online spending. But, before the spending season had even arrived consumers had decided how they were shopping. According to PCI Pal’s holiday shopping survey, the highest percentage of respondents (43.2%) planned to make purchases via retailers’ websites regardless of the increase in cybercrime and supply chain issues.

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For this reason, businesses need to constantly reevaluate their online security postures and payments technology in order to ensure consumer data is safe. Continued compliance and constant vigilance is the only way forward.

The unpredictability of this past holiday season proves the need for businesses to stay agile and adaptive to the threat landscape and our constantly changing and volatile world. With all this uncertainty, retailers need to focus on what they know and what they can control to succeed in 2022. Listen to your customers and learn from consumer behaviors and trends, while at the same time focusing on compliance and regulatory standards. There are no sure bets in the new normal, but a focus on the foundations can strengthen your overall strategy for 2022.

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