Many online retailers are offering free shipping during this holiday season. Find out more about this phenomenon here.

Free shipping has become necessary for many online retailers to better compete with their brick and mortar counterparts. In fact, many Boston online marketing companies are recommending that e-commerce sites offer shipping promotions to their customers in an effort to get some much needed customers during the busy holiday shopping season this year.

Providing free shipping has become a necessity in this industry, so much that it has become a standard offer during the holiday season. According to a recent New York Times article, many online retailers are extending the dates where they normally offer free shipping. The report goes on to mention how 90% of online retailers are going to offer free shipping at some point of the holiday shopping seasons. Many retailers are also extending the dates to which they offer this shipping promotion. 86% of those who offer free overnight shipping or two day shipping will be extending these offers until December 22nd this year.

Retailers are always reminding their customers of this offer. In fact, many Boston search engine marketing companies are seeing online retailers including the keywords "free shipping" in the keywords that they target for their online promotional activities on search engines.

Even though this promotion is popular during the holiday shopping season, free shipping is rapidly becoming a standard offering year round for many retailers. Lower shipping rates by commercial carriers, as well as lower costs of operation for e-commerce sites have contributed to many e-commerce sites offering this to their customers.

This trend is not surprising, as according to a recent Market Watch report on online shopping by individual consumers, the shipping options and their associated costs are an important consideration by shoppers who buy online. It wouldn't make too much sense for someone to buy a product online, but end up paying more for it because of the added shipping charges which would result in it costing more than what it would take to buy it in a retail store. This explains why economy class shipping is now offered for free on many websites, especially when it comes to purchases of large items, such as TVs, computers, etc.

This is not only beneficial to consumers, but also to others associated with the e-commerce industry. As a result of offering lower shipping rates to commercial clients, shipping companies such as FedEx and UPS have seen a recent growth of shipping for online orders. There are also many Boston web development companies who have redesigned the websites of their clients in order to make their free shipping offers featured more prominently on the websites of their clients in order to attract more shoppers.