Sales of gift cards, one of the most popular business gifts in recent years, are also growing online, said Jonathan Price, who oversees the business gifts division of GiftCertificates.com. Mr. Price said his company has recently been printing more customized gift cards that bear a corporation’s logo. So-called virtual gift certificates, which employees receive and redeem entirely online, are also increasingly popular, he said.
Tiffany, too, has experienced growth in the number of business gifts bought on its Web site, said Mark L. Aaron, a spokesman. Executives will often go online, and pick up a few items for their most valued clients while also buying for loved ones, he said. “And since it saves the time of our account executives,” he added, “it’s more efficient for us, too.”
While Amazon has a foot in the door of this market, it still faces a lot of competition in increasing its share of merchandise through these systems. According to Bruce Bolger, the managing director for the Incentive Performance Center, an industry group, more manufacturers and retailers are lining up to sell their wares to employees as corporations shift more money into incentive programs. Mr. Bolger said that since 2000, when corporations spent about $13 billion on merchandise gifts for employees, executives have devoted much more energy and money to rewarding workers.
In these programs, corporations typically reward workers with points (as in frequent-flier programs) for achieving company goals, or as year-end gifts. Workers use their company-specific Web site to track and redeem points for Margarita mixers, iPods or even flat-screen televisions.
Mr. Peterman said his clients now use the Internet almost exclusively to select goods, where in 1999, 83 percent of the items selected by employees were ordered offline.
For the vendors that administer the rewards programs on a company’s behalf, Amazon’s entry into the market gives workers a wider range of items to select from. For Amazon, it means a connection to businesses that buy hundreds of thousands of items annually, and a new way to market itself to consumers.
FOR years, employees have had to hide their online shopping habit. Now they can start coming out of the closet.
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“This market is huge, and there’s not a service out there that’s really helping human resources managers come up with creative gifts within their budgets,” Mr. Lynch said.
Scott Merlino, the senior manager of the merchandise rewards service, said the service has helped employers offer gifts specifically suited to a worker’s tastes. One client, for example, has already bought more than 100,000 items from Amazon, and 25,000 of those items were for single orders.
,, *** love, *** love Earrings,
*** love Bracelets,,
Internet retailers and corporations have grown chummy in recent years, with merchants offering companies corporate gift and incentive programs. Emboldened, online retailers are designing technology and Web pages to capture more of the roughly $32 billion in merchandise sales spent on workers and clients annually.
Harry & David, the food retailer, is bracing for the busiest two weeks of the year for business gifts starting today, according to William Ihle, a spokesman. Mr. Ihle would not say exactly how much the company’s business-related Internet sales have grown. “But it’s a very, very strong business for us, and we’re seeing solid growth,” he said.
The trend toward buying business gifts online has attracted the attention of other Internet companies, like IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Gifts.com, a gift-related search site. According to William Lynch, Gifts.com’s chief, about 9 percent of the searches conducted in November were for business gifts, compared with about 7 percent a year earlier.
This year, for example, Amazon introduced the merchandise rewards program, aimed not at consumers, but at companies like USMotivation, MotivAction Worldwide and Maritz, which manage employee incentive programs for businesses like Caterpillar, Motel 6 and others.
The merchandise rewards program also brings some residual marketing benefits. Even though employees do not know they are selecting items from Amazon, they receive shipments in Amazon boxes, usually within five days of ordering. “If they haven’t already ordered from us before, it could get them to check out the Web site,” Mr. Merlino said.
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Hans-Eric Gosch, senior business development manager of the service, would not say how many customers it has attracted, but said he was pleased with the growth. “It’s not been a hard sell,” he said.
Among other things, corporations are stepping up their employee retention programs, in anticipation of a labor shortage caused by retirements, said Mark Peterman, a vice president for marketing for Maritz Motivation, a division of Maritz Inc., located in Fenton, Mo.
“Companies are putting more thought into how to maximize the benefit to the corporation while genuinely saying thank you,” Mr. Peterman said. While bonus cash tends to get mixed in with regular compensation, he added, “when they select an item, that’s something they can point back to and remember, along with the company.”
This year, Mr. Ihle said, Harry & David overhauled its Web site to, among other things, better promote its business-related service, including a feature that shows the most popular business gifts at various price levels.
Scott Merlino, left, and Hans-Eric Gosch, both of Amazon’s merchandise rewards division, which offers corporate gifts.
Based on that trend, the company recently added a business gifts section to the site, filled with items like business-card scanners, personalized laptop covers and Starbucks gift baskets. Gifts.com will also negotiate bulk discounts next year on behalf of businesses that want to buy, for example, a thousand desktop accessories for employees or clients.
