Rewarding customers spurs ShoppersChoice.com holiday sales to rise 32%

It’s difficult to find a credit card company that doesn’t offer some kind of program that rewards customers with points, redeemable for merchandise or services. Such rewards points programs, though, are not as common in the realm of online retailing.

ShoppersChoice.com LLC, however, got the point. Its rewards points program, launched last year, increased 2005 holiday season revenue 32% over the previous season, says Michael Hackley, CEO of the online retailer as well as BBQGuys.com, a multi-channel company. “Five of every 10 customers are signing up for the rewards program. People love points,” Hackley says. “On BBQGuys.com, customers buy one or two items; on ShoppersChoice, they’re buying five to 10. The people doing the heavier buying are the ones signing up for the rewards program. And it’s the program that will be one of the driving forces behind our continued growth.”

Customers accrue two points for every dollar they spend at ShoppersChoice.com. Points are redeemable for any merchandise on the web site. The points program, however, is not offered by sister-site BBQGuys.com, No. 371 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites.

Hot products for the 2005 holiday season on ShoppersChoice.com, which launched last year, included cookware, housewares and consumer electronics. In November, the e-retailer launched a books section that offers nearly 800,000 titles. “Books, as well as posters, also were popular this season,” Hackley adds.

Increased holiday season marketing efforts by the Baton Rouge, LA-based company were hindered by two factors: the devastation by Hurricane Katrina and the addition of more and smaller products. “The hurricane was a real stick in the mud for our operations,” Hackley reports. “It set us back quite a bit.”

Additionally, a vast increase in product offerings and decrease in the cost and size of these myriad new products presented the company with an unexpected difficulty. “We were used to shipping big, high-end BBQ grills,” Hackley says. “After launching ShoppersChoice.com last year, we now are shipping books and toasters and things of all shapes and sizes. As a result, we have to ship three times the packages on ShoppersChoice.com to get the same revenue on BBQGuys.com. Our backend infrastructure was having problems handing this change. So we focused on righting the system over increased marketing.”