08-12-2020
A year of record online sales culminates at Christmas. More than 2.5 million Finns or 57% of the respondents to Posti’s latest survey say they are buying their Christmas presents online. More than 700,000 of them say that they have already ordered gifts for Christmas. The survey was conducted at the end of November, and more than one thousand Finns took part.
Consumers are attracted online by the freedom of making purchases when it suits them. 67% of respondents quoted freedom as the main reason. The next most important factors were safety and the lack of crowds (56%) and ease and time savings (56%). Nearly half of the respondents (48%) also enjoyed the lack of stress and queues.
Tommi Kässi, Vice President, Parcel and eCommerce at Posti, is happy but not surprised by the results: “This follows the trend we’ve already seen and what we’ve been preparing for since early this year. The COVID-19 pandemic has attracted consumers even more to online stores. Personally, I’m happy about how actively consumers are ordering products from Finnish online stores. In challenging times like these, it is particularly important,” says Kässi.
Christmas parcel record likely to be broken again
Posti’s Christmas season is busier than ever: A total of 1.5 million parcels were processed during the Black Friday week. Tommi Kässi believes that the record will be broken before Christmas.
“It’s perfectly possible that the weekly number of parcels will be close to two million. We’ve been preparing for this avalanche of parcels with several measures, such as 7-day delivery, by establishing additional pickup points, by innovating new solutions, such as the drive-in parcel pickup point that opened at Seinäjoki, as well as leaving parcels at the recipient’s doorstep as a COVID safety measure. We’re hoping that customers will pick up their parcels as soon as possible after receiving the notice of arrival so that we’re able to clear the backlog of parcels as best we can.”
More than half a million Finns or 12% of all respondents believe that the COVID-19 pandemic has permanently changed the way people buy online. Posti agrees: the plan is to make some of the temporary Christmas pickup points permanent, and the network of Parcel Points will continue its strong growth next year.
Commissioned by Posti, the survey was conducted by IROResearch Oy’s national consumer panel on November 17–26, 2020, with a total of 1,000 respondents.
Source: Posti