Christmas shopping to remain resilient despite cost-of-living pressures: Accenture

The average Aussie is expected to spend $819 this Christmas on gifts and celebrations, with the rise of machine learning and AI to be a key source of gift recommendations for shoppers.

Christmas shopping is set to remain resilient this year despite cost-of-living pressures, says Accenture. Picture : Nicki Connolly

Australians are set to spend up this Christmas and holiday season on gifts and food, but will increasingly be driven by bargains and deals from retailers amid the cost of living crisis.

And the future of those purchasing decisions will be swept up in the huge revolution underway in artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms that will recommend present ideas for consumers to start to overshadow the traditional search engines as a way to find gifts.

Technology consulting group Accenture’s 18th annual holiday shopping survey has predicted Australians will spend on average $819 this season, with Christmas spending this year spread between the popular promotional days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday to be higher by 4 per cent despite cost-of-living pressures putting some strains on household budgets.

Jill Standish, global lead for Accenture’s retail industry group, said it was encouraging that consumers were planning to spend more this holiday season, but with this optimistic outlook came a reminder that price and value remained front-of-mind for many.

“I’m not saying it is all going to be rosy, I think basically we are saying that I am cautiously optimistic. If I look at it in a very simple way, I think everyone is on a budget and so if you look at some of the data points that we have got most folks are going to be looking at value and that is why I use the term ‘cautious optimism’.

“Everyone will be looking for value,” she said.

Australians will spend on average $819 this Christmas. Picture: Supplied

Ms Standish said retailers will need to cater for a group of “deal seekers” who love a bargain and are driven by promotions, incentives and savings. The Accenture report found that almost seven in 10 consumers rated price and value among the most important factors in deciding what retailer to buy from, and 31 per cent said they will shop as and when they are offered promotions or discounts.

Accenture believes that between Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year – an early sale that is increasingly becoming the time when Australians buy up their Christmas presents – Australian retailers should rake in around $6.7bn, or up 5 per cent. It is forecast that 44 per cent of shoppers are planning to shop between early November and early December.

Gift cards are again expected to be popular, with 68 per cent of Australian consumers perceived buying a gift card as an easy and safe option. However, for those on the receiving side of a gift card as a present, nearly 28 per cent said they were disappointed that the person hadn’t put time and effort into planning a personalised gift.

Meanwhile, looking beyond this Christmas and in the years ahead, Ms Standish sees a rising importance for machine learning and platforms such as ChatGPT for recommending present ideas for Australians instead of the traditional method of using search engines to seek out gift ideas.

For retailers, this meant they would need to improve their product descriptions online as machine learning bots scoured the internet for gift ideas to recommend to consumers.

“One of the things we are talking about this year is how different consumers are going to be presented with certain products, so instead of searching on your own it will be really around recommendations.

“If you look at what Meta (Facebook), Amazon and even big tech like Google, instead of traditional search now it will be all recommendations. Who is influencing who in the future is going to be super interesting, and I think Large Language Models are going to be the next influencers.”