Why wrapping gift is a way to increase sales?

To understand the reason why wrapping gift is a way to boost your orders during holiday season, we need to investigate the psychology behind wrapping paper. Do recipients like wrapped gifts more than unwrapped? If the answer is yes, it is undoubtedly that a customer will prefer a store with convenient gift-wrap service more than a normal one due to their extra time to find a place for wrapping the present. This idea seems to work better with online store where people are looking for a door-to-door service for a gift, which means they can buy online, choose the wrapping paper online and then send to the recipient fast and easily through the shipping method without any movement on the busy streets.

Do recipients like wrapped gifts more than unwrapped?

According to a study published in 1992 by Daniel Howard, professor of marketing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, it turns out to be right. To test this question, Dr Howard designed a series of experiments to test his basic hypothesis: a gift-wrapped item influences the recipient to have a more favorable attitude towards owning the gift item.

Before going into details of each experiment, we just want to clarify the reason why we want to share with you these interesting surveys. These stories will help you get to know more about the recipients’ behaviors when receiving gift in real cases, not assumption or scenario.

In an experiment, 82 different university students received their bicycle seat cover either wrapped or unwrapped. Some students were led to believe that the gift was meant for them while others thought that it was meant for someone else. Those recipients who thought the gift was for them were happier with it when it was wrapped. Those who thought the gift was for someone else didn’t care whether the gift was wrapped.

Yet another experiment tested whether the perceived “quality” of the wrapping paper itself affected the attitudes towards the gift. In this experiment, another 60 university students were given wrapped, unwrapped or “non-traditionally wrapped” gifts (used brown packaging paper with neither ribbons nor bows). Probably not surprisingly, the nicely wrapped gift was the most favorite, while the unwrapped gift was the least favorite. Even the plain brown paper wrapped gift was preferred more than the one that was not wrapped at all.

So why do we care about wrapping paper? Based on the above experiments, the author argues that:

Gift-wrapping is a visual signal that is associated with happy events in a person’s life

 

Online store, what you should do now?

If you do not want to be left behind the curve, you should consider adding gift-wrap service during this peek time of shopping season. This intention will be much easier with a customized extension for your website. Imagine that your customer can:

• Wrap one or multiple products in shopping cart
• Able to add gift card, personal message to each gift box
• Review paper style and Gift card before wrapping
• Extra fee is automatically added to orders with wrapping

Screenshot of Gift Wrap extension on frontend – Step choosing gift box style and how to wrap products

Please find more information about functions & benefits of our Magento Gift Wrap. Don’t forget that within November, there are plenty of promotion campaigns for Holiday extensions in Magestore (explore here). We hope that your customers will be found happier many times with your gift-wrap add on. Thank so much!