I’m lucky. Or, at least I feel like I’m lucky. I don’t have to battle the lines, crowds, and traffic associated with holiday shopping. You see, I have several siblings that love to shop. So, with some careful planning I can deftly delegate all shopping off to each of them. I’m the idea guy. I come up with the gift – they get it.

As much as the holidays seem to put people in a good mood, they also seem to drive people crazy when making a trip to any retail store. It’s the yin and the yang of holiday shopping.

However, with more and more people shopping online, I’m not the only one avoiding these frustrations. To no one’s surprise, we are seeing more and more people flocking to e-commerce sites and spending more and more time online. Below is a graph showing traffic numbers to the most popular department stores for the first 15 days of November in 2007 vs 2008. You’ll see that in general, most sites are seeing an increase in traffic.

Since most people now are multi-channel consumers, companies need to think of creative ways to tie the various online and offline efforts and results together. Kohls.com has invested some noticeable real estate on their home page to this effort.

The Kohls.com Store Survey is an excellent tool encouraging consumers who have purchased offline to come online and share their valuable feedback. Some may scoff at this claiming it is not any different than printing a phone number for a survey on the store receipt. However, in addition to all of the benefits of using an online survey, Kohls is tying the online and offline channels together, getting the consumer to interact with them in a multichannel approach, developing yet another connection with the consumer, and encouraging multi-channel behaviour. And their customer base is letting them. An average of 180,000 people each month click on their Store Survey option.

Store Locators. Ship to Store. Item Availability (offline). Etc…. The transparency between the various channels is increasing. And that’s a good thing (for us consumers). Kohl’s has taken yet another creative way to help push for this transparency, and it will be interesting to watch in this Copy Cat world who else will follow suit.

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