Special Report: E-Commerce & Catalog Technology: A Gift for All Seasons

Depending on their product offerings, merchants should devise a range of potential recipients. This shouldn’t just be by gender and age, but also by interest. For example, “Bakers” and “Grill Masters” work well for a kitchen goods online catalog. You can even have categories for pet gifts.

Marketers also should offer a range of options for filtering by price. While our surveys show that most gift guides had at least one category for shopping gifts by price (usually for bargain gifts), the top sites went the extra mile, offering a wide range of price points. They averaged 3.75 price-based categories, which is 212 percent more than the bottom five sites.