In my last holiday-focused post, I noted that consumers surveyed in the 2009 eHoliday Study said consumer ratings and reviews were one of the very most important features on a retailer site this season. Conducted last month in partnership with BIGresearch, we delved a little further into information sources that consumers use, asking, “In general, if you are looking for information about a retailer or products, which of the following Web sites or types of online information do you anticipate using this coming (2009) holiday season? (Check all that apply).”

Almost two-thirds of consumers confirmed again the primacy of consumer ratings and reviews in the research part of the gift buying process. However, they certainly don’t stop there:  over one third said they used comparison shopping sites, and fully one in ten cited Facebook.com and blogs as information sources (somewhat fewer cited Twitter, though I’m guessing that will only grow over the coming months). 

A further note about Facebook, blogs and other social media:  while consumers use them as part of their information gathering process, for now these sources are rarely the starting point for shopping per se. When we asked consumers, “Where do you typically start your online shopping? (Check all that apply)”, consumers told us that they are most likely to start their online shopping at merchant Web sites (almost three-quarters), search engines / directories (one third), and catalogs or offline stores (about a quarter) — with social media sites trailing far behind. Nevertheless, social media sites, blogs and the like already are important in the overall research process and serve a significant consumer engagement function at very least. 

Stay tuned for more holiday research insights next week.  If you have a moment, please let me know what you think of this holiday research series.