No sooner are we out of the back-to-school season than the fourth quarter holiday retail frenzy beckons. The drumbeat has already started as retailers try to read the tea leaves from back-to-school shopping and recent earnings reports as a sort of rough holiday guide. Retailers of all types are casting a sharp eye on inventory management, product mix and timing of promotions as they prepare for holiday sales.

Rob Heller, founder and CEO of DealYard, an online retailer of discounted brand name home goods, spoke with me recently about his company’s preparation for holiday sales, SEO, use of affiliate programs and social media strategies. DealYard buys excess and closeout inventory directly from manufacturers of housewares, tools, personal care items, kitchen appliances, bath fittings and small electronics.

Heller manages DealYard’s strategic direction, along with its operational, technical and financial activities. Previously, he was a founder of MaterialNet.com, a strategic sourcing software provider for Fortune 1000 companies and worked on Wall Street.

eMarketer: What is your outlook for the upcoming holiday shopping season?

Rob Heller:

It’s difficult to gauge. So far, for the first half of this year, we’re up over 10% vs. last year. We’re anticipating solid growth during the holiday season with at least a 20% increase over last year.

eMarketer: What is DealYard doing to prepare for the holiday shopping season?

Heller:

We’ve already begun preparing our direct marketing plan which entails direct mail to our existing customer base with special deals and promotions. Since we recently joined the Commission Junction affiliate program, we’re going to be aggressively trying to bring more affiliates into our program. We’ll be offering them exclusive coupon codes for use on some of the coupon sites.

We’re also becoming more active with social media programs, posting more to the blog which we created a couple of months ago. The blog posts automatically post to our Facebook and Twitter accounts. We anticipate using Facebook and Twitter to offer limited-time exclusive coupons and promotions. For example, for the next three hours customers can use a specific coupon code and save 15% on any order. We also plan to place product reviews and video product reviews on Facebook.

We’ll do deals of the day, directly from our homepage. We’ll promote those through our email program, as well as social media.

eMarketer: What are some of the challenges you face in planning for the holiday season?

Heller:

There are a few challenges because sales are about five to six times greater than they are during the regular season. We have to make sure we are getting all our orders out within a day. With customer feedback being as important as it is, we need to make sure that we get positive feedback from across all of our different channels. That’s always a challenge.

Another challenge is making sure that our customer service department answers customer questions and concerns within a timely manner. We are planning a phone system that will integrate directly with our CRM application so when a customer calls, their information will automatically come up on the computer. We’ll know who they are and that’s going to help us be much more effective.

One of the other real challenges is remaining price competitive on the items that we sell because every few days, our competitors will undercut us and become the low seller. We see a drastic reduction in sales when we get undercut on pricing.

We’re constantly monitoring our competition and seeing where we stand and analyzing our sales per item. If we see a slowdown in our turnover for individual items we try to understand what’s happening. Is it something about the product description? Is the image not clear?

eMarketer: Which product categories will have video reviews?

Heller:

All of our categories. For instance, if we sell a coffee maker or a quesadilla maker, consumers can shoot video of themselves in the kitchen using those items. They would post them to our site.

eMarketer:Do those kinds of product videos or tutorials really help drive sales?

Heller:

Video and written product reviews are very strong. When customers see other customer reviews on the products, it definitely helps drive sales. If there’s a video on the product, and it shows how easy it is to use, combined with well-written customer reviews, that will help drive sales.

eMarketer: Do you think consumer shopping behavior and attitudes will be different this year?

Heller:

They’re going to be very similar to last year. The economic recovery has been very slow and unemployment is still very high. Consumers are still going to be very prudent and price-sensitive. They’ll be looking for the best value and deals they can find.

eMarketer: Have you noticed any patterns in how customers use DealYard? You mentioned customers love the product reviews.

Heller:

Yes, we place reviews on our site powered by PowerReviews and they definitely influence customers’ buying patterns and behavior. Positive reviews combined with good value help drive sales. We’re also finding that for more of our sales, customers are using coupons they access from coupon sites.

For a while, we were telling our customers to either register on our site, or just go through the one-page checkout process. We’re finding that about 85% of them are choosing not to register, and create a username and password. So we recently implemented a one-page checkout to make it easier for our customers.

eMarketer: What are the pitfalls to avoid in preparing for the holiday season?

Heller:

Some of the pitfalls are marketing expenses because during the holiday season, a lot of the comparison shopping engines increase their PPC (pay-per-click) rates by as much as 50%. And if you’re not constantly monitoring and analyzing your ROI, you can waste a lot of marketing dollars. When they raise their CPC (cost-per-click) rates, we put on additional filters and don’t submit as many products to them.

eMarketer: What is DealYard’s approach to holiday advertising and promotions?

Heller:

We dramatically increase the amount of direct email pieces that we send out. We are generating a lot of incentives and coupon codes to our affiliates and to our existing customers. We’re constantly tweaking our organic SEO and trying to increase the amount of PPC campaigns through Google AdWords.

We use a lot of email with our existing customer base. It’s opt-in and we don’t go out and buy lists. We generate new customers through affiliate programs like Commission Junction and ShareASale.com and ongoing organic SEO efforts.

We’re constantly increasing our product base by differentiating our product offerings. We’re on a dozen different marketplaces and comparison shopping engines. We’re looking to add about four or five more marketplaces. It’s really just a matter of submitting a product feed to them and then marketing your products to their customers. They also do organic search to help things along.

eMarketer: Do you have a mobile e-commerce program? If so do you expect mobile shopping to have a significant impact on business this holiday season?

Heller:

About three months ago we implemented a mobile e-commerce platform with our AspDotNetStoreFront application, which makes it so much easier for our customers to transact business via their smartphones. It’s very user-friendly. We didn’t have this mobile platform enabled last year.

Last year, if customers had an iPhone, they could go to DealYard.com and transact but it would be difficult. And for any other smartphones, such as the BlackBerry, it would be nearly impossible. Images appear and instead of rendering horizontally like they’re supposed to, they were vertical on the application. Now that we have a mobile e-commerce platform enabled, it’s easier to transact business. There’s also a live chat mechanism and email capability. You just go to a browser and type in Dealyard.com and the software automatically recognizes that you’re on a smartphone browser.

eMarketer: What have you noticed since the implementation?

Heller:

More people are using it to browse and search for products and they’re also transacting business. You can’t really compare it to last year, because it wasn’t a very significant form of revenue for us. The more people use their smartphones to go to all the different comparison shopping engines they’ll see DealYard’s low prices and be able to do business with us straight from their phones.

Frank Badillo, vice president and senior retail economist at Kantar Retail specializes in analysis and forecasting of economic, retail and consumer trends. He contributes to Kantar’s retail intelligence platform and regularly writes about the economic outlook for the monthly Retail Economist newsletter. He also directs the retail channel and product category forecasts for the annual US Retail Outlook. I chatted with Badillo about the upcoming holiday season and the state of the retail sector.

eMarketer: What is your outlook for the upcoming online holiday shopping season?

Badillo:

What we see that non-store sales and online shopping in particular have been very strong for the last six months. It’s been the strongest channel among of all of retailing. The channel is benefiting, to some extent, from a very weak year-ago comparison period, but it’s pretty clear that there’s strong demand for goods online. Right now through September is going to be key. There’s the back-to-school spurt, but we don’t really know what it portends for the holiday exactly.

A lot of demand we see tends to be skewed toward electronics. There are a lot of hot gadgets out there between the iPad, e-book readers and smartphones. All those things are driving very strong demand. Particularly with the e book readers, there’s a lot of demand among early adopters. The big question is to what extent a lot of that growth can be sustained in the longer term.

I suspect that we’re going to see very healthy growth into the holiday. It just may moderate somewhat from the very strong growth we’ve seen in recent months.

eMarketer: So consumer electronics in particular will have a strong holiday season.

Badillo:

Exactly, and particularly online.

eMarketer: Do you think online shopping behavior will be different this year?

Badillo:

In our monthly Shopperscape surveys, we ask a question about consumers’ spending intentions. The response has been steadily improving over the past year. There was a bit of a blip in our June number, but generally there’s been improvement in spending intentions over time. We expect that to continue and result in much better spending into the holiday than we saw last year.

But at the same time, there is some renewed uncertainty among shoppers that could curb some of the spending improvement in the coming months. I suspect that by the holiday time frame, some of that uncertainty should be cleared up and we’ll see the recovery continue, albeit at a bit more modest pace than we saw in the initial months of the year.

eMarketer: What key challenges will retailers face this holiday season?

Badillo:

Retailers cut prices pretty dramatically last year to draw shoppers and, in the end, it probably did more to weaken their top line sales as well as their profits. They will want to try to avoid the kind of ruinous price competition that they engaged in last year and try to be more strategic about it for this holiday.

Retailers are struggling with the extent to which they need to boost their inventories amid signs of rebounding demand. We’ve gone through a phase where retailers dramatically cut back their inventories. So now they’re slowly increasing those inventories again. The question is, to what extent they should continue to do that? There’s just a lot of uncertainty about whether they should do that.

I suspect we’ll see inventories expand a bit too much, which is going to put some downward pressure on prices for the second half of the year. We’ve already seen some signs of that in the apparel sector. There’s some growing price pressure in the sector after a good year or so of very slight price increases.

The inventory question is huge for a lot of retailers heading into the holidays, as well as the related pricing question. If there’s inventory overhang through the holiday, that’s going to put downward pressure on prices.

But there’s also the question as to when retailers should roll out promotions. Given how much price competition there was last year, I think retailers are going to look all the more closely about what they price-promote and the timing of those price promotions.

eMarketer: What are your projections for overall retail growth?

Badillo:

For total retail sales, excluding autos and gasoline, we’re looking for overall growth in the second half of the year of about 3.5%. The government numbers out today [July 14] show that we’ve had growth averaging about 3.9% for the last two months.

In terms of the government numbers, non-store sales are growing at a double-digit pace. Online probably represents the lion’s share of non-store sales. It’s also going to include catalog sales but I suspect that it’s the online shopping that’s driving the double-digit growth. We’ll continue to see double-digit growth in online sales through the holiday which can only mean that the average market basket size for any given shopper will grow significantly compared to a year ago.

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As consumers plunge into back-to-school fall shopping and well in advance of the holiday shopping season, there’s a new location-based shopping app in town–Shopkick. In case you’re thinking “ho hum, it’s just another app” consider this: By downloading the free app from iTunes, consumers will get direct access to retail offers and earn a currency dubbed “Kickbucks” that can be redeemed for rewards or donated to charity.

Shopkick says it will give consumers who’ve downloaded the app rewards and offers just for walking into participating retailers. When I spoke with Shopkick CEO Cyriac Roeding earlier this summer, he positioned the app as a conversion tool that would enable brick-and-mortar retailers to drive more foot traffic and rev sales.

Last week, Shopkick announced that its geo-retailing service will be deployed at 100 Simon Malls, a big coup, along with previously announced partners Macy’s, Best Buy, American Eagle and The Sports Authority. Best Buy will launch a test-run of the service in over 250 of its stores by Oct. 1. Best Buy, through a spokeswoman told me by email: “This is a part of our broader experiments with technology for consumers, and it’s a facet of our overall, multichannel approach to bridge the physical and digital retail experiences.”

Shopkick says rewards and offers are live now in partner store locations in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and will kick-off in Chicago and other cities in the coming weeks. Within the next four weeks, more than 600 individual stores and 100 Simon-run malls will have fully deployed the technology.

Here’s how the thing works: When consumers enter participating retailers, their smartphones pick up a signal (a technology that retailers install) alerting them to relevant store offers. They receive Shopkick “Kickbucks” just for showing up which can be redeemed for rewards or donated to charity. Roeding takes pains to say that Shopkick is unlike regular GPS technology which requires consumers to check in. Instead, this system enables a seamless communication because of the Shopkick signal which doesn’t require check-in.

I think anything, including this app, that can lure shoppers into stores and drive purchases could be helpful to retailers provided that they tie in with smart, relevant offers. The app can be considered a form of multichannel retailing and could, if enough retail chains sign on and enough consumers download the app, become a decent form of in-store communication. Shopkick hopes, no doubt, that the app will keep shoppers in stores longer, browsing, taking advantage of offers and buying on impulse. The findings of a study by e-Rewards and TNS International found that 13.6% of GenY consumers used their phone to access the web for special offers and coupons while shopping.

If that’s the case, the Shopkick app makes it even easier since consumers won’t have to go out to the mobile web for those offers–they’ll get them automatically and seamlessly via the app.

Participating retailers are expected to deliver in-store deals, and/or added bonuses for scanning barcodes of specific products. For example, shoppers will receive Kickbucks for trying on clothes and scanning a barcode in American Eagle Outfitters dressing rooms. They’ll receive additional Kickbucks for scanning and learning about products and services at Best Buy. The faux currency can also be redeemed for Facebook credits to play online games online, download songs, in-store gift card rewards at participating stores, magazine subscriptions, iPods, and charitable donations.

The app has raised concerns among privacy advocates since offers are personalized based on consumer preferences, previous shopping behavior, interests, location and scans. Quoted in AOL’s Daily Finance, Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said via e-mail: “Shopkick should rename their awards currency ‘kickback’ — instead of ‘kickbuck’ — because you are handing them a treasure trove of your personal data. Consumers have to ask themselves — is this a good trade-off for my privacy? Shopkick’s so-called rewards are really digital bribes so you will gave them carte blanche to collect reams of data on you.”

I’ll reserve judgement until I see how easy the app is to use and how retailers decide the kinds of personalized offers they’ll deliver.

As flash sites like Rue La La and ideeli have diversified from apparel into housewares, beauty and travel, other online businesses have begun staking claims in their own specialties. Why should Gilt Groupe broker dining discounts when culinary brands could capitalize on their own expertise?

Zagat Exclusives, the “original crowd-sourced dining guide,” is the latest restaurant site to jump into the group-buying fray with its September NYC launch. Yelp also began testing daily deals in Sacramento, CA this July, while OpenTable just launched their version, OpenTable Spotlight, earlier this month in Boston and New York.

These are just the established companies branching out. Newcomers InBundles, VillageVines and BlackboardEats—also focused on food deals—are trying to enter this market as well.

Zagat, which will be teaming up with Groupon competitor DealOn, aims to set itself apart by functioning more like a flash sale. Specials will be offered in limited quantities for fixed periods of time with no minimum number of participants. The twist is that the price will lower as more people join. When time runs out, the listed price is what everyone pays.

There’s no secret why these sites, which normally rely on daily emails to get the word out about discounts, are flourishing. According to Valpak 66% of Americans say they’re currently searching more for coupons and discounts than in the past, and 75% will continue this behavior even after the recession ends. Combine that with the fact that across all age ranges, offers sent through email are the best way of getting consumers to try restaurants, and it’s clear that these inbox-filling online sales are paying off.

As more players enter the increasingly saturated dining deals market, more niches are being filled. It’s no longer just half-off falafel, but discounted multicourse tasting menus at Michelin-starred restaurants—that still cost hundreds of dollars. The “foodier” these sites get, the more aware they need to be of public perception and the potential for appearing desperate.

When I recently received an OpenTable message touting a half-off special at Gordon Ramsay at the London, my first thought wasn’t, “Oh, I’d like to eat at the restaurant of that chef who yells on TV.” I already knew this was a restaurant on its last legs and now it had been made obvious. This critical sentiment was consequently echoed on food blogs.

In the more dining-savvy—some would say snobbier—cities, do customers want to be eating in an empty room—or, gasp, with a bunch of bargain-hunters (yes, just like themselves)?

Perhaps. Coupons have lost their nickel-and-diming stigma. A Coupons.com survey conducted in May 2010 found that consumers with household incomes of more than $100,000 were nearly twice as likely to use online coupons than those earning less than $35,000 annually, at 39% vs. 21%.

The question is whether restaurants will stigmatize themselves. A good deal can serve exactly its intended purpose, tapping new audiences and putting bodies in seats. It’s yet to be seen if this approach will translate to repeat business for struggling eateries, though, particularly those with a high price point.

Zagat does offer a statistic that could be key, at least for their new venture: “Zagat surveyors visit the places they vote on over eight times per year on average.” If they can translate this type of loyalty to their Zagat Exclusives users, restaurants should have few worries about getting involved with group buying.

Online search is a fairly standard tool for finding anything from directions to a restaurant to conducting price and feature comparisons on a new refrigerator. So it’s no real surprise that Canadian moms head online to conduct research about potential purchases large and small. And in particular, they go online to learn more about consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands—ingredients, recipes and other stuff—prior to buying.

Research conducted by Google Canada and OTX in March and published in June indicates that 81% of Canadian moms are searching for information before they head to the store. Search is their No. 1 online source, followed by email, maps, retailer websites and social networking sites.

The study “Canadian Moms Click for CPG” surveyed 4,896 women ages 18 to 75 in Canada including 3,806 moms to find that 76% indicated that search engines helped them learn more about consumer packaged goods (CPG). Those items include food items (grocery and fast-food), baby and childcare products, household and personal care brands, appliances and more.

The data for Canadian moms vs. US moms reveals similar patterns, according to Chantal Rossi, industry manager for retail, Google Canada. For example, in the US, 50% of moms expect popular CPG brands to be at the top of the search results page vs. 51% in Canada and new moms tend to be online more frequently. Other similarities include moms preference for hopping online early in the morning and late at night: “Moms are digital snackers, they come online whenever they get a few minutes,” Ross says.

The bottom line? Rossi says the overwhelming majority of Canadian moms are researching online to influence an in-store purchase. “Consumers recognize that CPG brands and retail websites have information online and before they go into the store, they can gather important information.” The research, she says, verifies that moms’ purchase decisions are influenced by information they obtain online before they get into the store. “The shelf might be the first moment of truth, but online is the zero moment of truth,” Ross adds.