This holiday season, humdrum is hot
Yes, toys and gadgets are moving fast, but in a tentative shopping season, online customers are scooping up everyday items.
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| Nothing says 'happy holidays' quite like a car battery charger. |
(Fortune) -- Move over, Nintendo Wii. Step aside, Apple iPhone. According to the latest online shopping data, all we really want for Christmas is a car battery charger.
Based on the number of clicks generated by a bevy of leading e-commerce sites and search engines, one of the most surprising bestsellers - for the second holiday season in a row - is the Simple Start Battery Booster from Black & Decker, which currently runs for $42.50 at Amazon.com.
The data was crunched exclusively for Fortune by Channel Intelligence, a little-known software firm based in Orlando, Florida, that helps manufacturers like Samsung and Canon by providing Web links so consumers can quickly go from a manufacturers' product page to a list of retailers - both online and brick and mortar - who have that product in stock. A quick search of the Black & Decker site, for example, found that the Battery Booster was in stock at Target and Wal-Mart (Charts, Fortune 500), but not at Home Depot (Charts, Fortune 500).
Founded in 1999, Channel Intelligence now works with over 300 manufacturer brands and retailers (including Black & Decker (Charts, Fortune 500)), and its tools facilitate the buying and selling of millions of products. The company also makes software that organizes and simplifies online product information for merchants such as Best Buy, Target (Charts, Fortune 500), and Circuit City.
"We don't make the shopping sites - we make the shopping sites better," says CEO Robert Wight, a former consultant for Microsoft, where he handled product design and development for Windows. In Black & Decker's case, a shopper on the B&D site who wants to buy a drill or wrench can connect to over a dozen merchants who have the product he wants, like Home Depot and Lowe's.
According to a study from market research firm Forrester, more than 70% of people do their product research on the Web, and over half (58%) begin that research at manufacturers' Web sites. "Before, you just had to get people into the stores," says Wight. "Now people initiate commerce from the Web."
Not only that, shoppers are more satisfied with their online shopping experience this year compared to previous years, according to a recent survey of over 54,000 visitors to retail Web sites conducted by ForeSee Results of Ann Arbor, Mich., which measures online customer satisfaction. In the first 26 days of November, shoppers spent nearly $11 billion online, a 17% increase over 2006, according to comScore.
The Simple Start Battery Booster - which plugs right into a car's cigarette lighter, eliminating the need for jumper cable - was among the top fifty products based on clicks over the past month on various product sites and search engines that work with Channel Intelligence. Last year it nearly cracked the top ten.
Of course, not every click translates into a sale, but the data suggests that demand for humdrum products can equal, if not surpass, the desire for more ballyhooed items. In addition to the battery booster, there were quite a few other everyday products on the top-50 list, like the Philips Sonicare FlexCare Power Toothbrush and a Western Digital 500 gigabyte external hard drive. To be sure, the list did also include the much-hyped products one would expect, like the Apple (Charts, Fortune 500) iPhone, the Xbox360, and a Barbie Dream House.
What's the lesson here? With stores seeing meager sales increases so far this holiday season - chain-store sales rose just 0.2% for the week ended Dec. 8, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers - perhaps retail executives should hold off on promotions of snazzy digital cameras and instead give those battery boosters more prominent shelf space. 
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