Gifting Drives Digital Picture Frame Sales

One of last year’s best selling Christmas gifts was digital photo frames. The reasons for this can be seen fairly easily. Prices are extremely competitive – possibly due to genuine material cost reductions and economies of scale – but also due to the strong competition among manufacturers in the market.

More importantly, digital picture frames make an ideal gift. They are just so easy to customise. All that you need to do is to store a few photos that will mean something to the gift’s recipient on a memory card and, hey presto – you have a unique gift that will be very well received.

There are many other advantages enjoyed by digital frames as well – they are environmentally friendly, they save space, they let you get your photos on display instantly. Some of the more expensive ones even have wireless connectivity to allow you to load photos onto them using the internet. These are all strong selling points – but I am convinced that it’s the ability to personalise them and make them unique that makes them so successful in the gift marketplace.

The nearest parallel I can think of would be digital cameras. You would think that these would attract the same market sales as digital photo frames. They are both highly technical gadgets, they are both used in the photographic arena, they have both dropped in price and they both offer a number of benefits when compared with the traditional equivalent.

However, whilst sales of digital cameras will certainly enjoy a boost just before Christmas, it’s nothing like the spike that can be expected for digital photo frames. Digital cameras tend to have good sales throughout the year with a peak in spring and early summer as people upgrade before heading off on their holiday, and another spike just before Xmas. Digital photo frames on the other hand have an enormous sales peak in the run up to Christmas – they are very heavily driven by gifting.

Whatever the reasons for the “peaky” sales of digital photo frames – it seems reasonable to assume that they will once again be one of the hot selling items in the pre-Christmas rush in 2009.