A new study from Overstock.com has confirmed what many retailers have already observed anecdotally: More consumers are shopping online, and that trend will extend deep into the 2013 holiday season.

As many as 75 percent of polled customers planned to take advantage of the Black Friday shopping holiday, and of those prospects, 57 percent planned to do so online. According to an article from Bloomberg, Cyber Monday sales increased 21% over 2012.

A significant portion of shoppers will continue turning to online retailers as their go-to source for gifts throughout the remainder of the holiday season as well.

Customers’ preferences for digital channels will also extend to mobile devices, with 76 percent of customers researching products before they buy them with help from their smartphones. One-quarter of respondents will even finalize orders via their tablets and smartphones. Unsurprisingly, younger consumers are leading the online shopping charge, with more than half of millennials expecting to spend approximately 40 percent of their holiday shopping budgets online.

“Online shopping allows consumers to make purchases comfortably from their home while avoiding the holiday rush, waiting in line, fighting traffic and suffering the weather,” stated Overstock.com Chairman and CEO Patrick M. Byrne.

More shoppers = more incentive to upgrade eCommerce software
For many merchants, the fact that the number of consumers shopping online – and the percentage of their budgets devoted to digital purchases – is growing shouldn’t come as a surprise.

The writing has long been on the wall, with a recent report from comScore highlighting more than eight quarters of successive year-over-year growth in terms of eCommerce sales.

However, the Overstock.com report should be a sign that it’s more important than ever before to have a fully functioning online shopping platform. The number of people taking to online channels to make purchases is growing faster and faster, so that means retailers will see more website traffic, sales, coupon redemption and just more activity overall.

Merchants need to run efficient ships, and the use of eCommerce software can help in that regard. Retailers could use a product like SalesWarp to bolster inventory management, consolidate activity and consumer data across channels and iron out any order management kinks. This will enable merchants to better serve customers, even as more of them begin shopping online.