John Lewis launches festive drive to help shoppers spread their Xmas spend

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Sep 28, 2022

John Lewis is the latest retailer to introduce initiatives to help customers afford their shopping – and particularly their festive shopping – this season. Its news comes after Amazon unveiled plans for Prime Early Access, a mid-October event meant to help customers “spread out their seasonal spending”.

Now John Lewis has revealed a raft of measure to help people “manage Christmas costs as they suffer from the high cost of living”.

The £30 minimum spend level for click & collect orders (below which a £2 charge had to be paid) has been suspended until 19 October. This means consumers will be able to make smaller orders via the service.

A number of retailers have introduced minimum spend levels for click & collect in recent periods in order to control their costs. But this could also dent sales in tough economic times and so the change to its policy does make good commercial sense.

That's especially the case as retailers target shoppers who are looking to spread their spend across several months and are shopping early for Christmas.

It has also extended its seasonal returns window. As of this week, John Lewis customers can exchange or return goods until 28 January. The company hasn't previously extended its already-wide wide returns window into September.

The retailer said it has seen evidence of consumers shopping early this year with some Christmas decorations, for instance, selling 10 times as many at the moment as a year ago, and Christmas tree sales are up almost 40% on the year.

As well as its convenience initiatives, next month the company is also launching a series of promotions across home, fashion and tech.

As mentioned, with Amazon also acting to grab a slice of early Christmas shopping, it's likely that other retailers will do the same with promotions and other initiatives set to be spread much more widely across the festive shopping season.