When it comes to holiday shopping, peak shopping days and times are experiencing a dramatic shift that could impact the timing of critical promotions. Consumers are shopping on days that were previously considered taboo for this type of activity, such as Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. It’s time for retailers to take note to ensure they don’t miss big opportunities to reach their buyers when they are actually shopping.
In Australia, it is well known that Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) is the peak shopping day of the year. Yet, according to a new SLI study, many consumers are starting their shopping on Christmas Day. SLI researched e-commerce site activity across 100 Australian retailer sites, analyzing 20 million queries over the month of December. Online shopping activity peaked at 8:00 p.m. AEDT on Christmas Day and 10:00 a.m. on Boxing Day. While Boxing Day exhibited 49.6 percent more activity than Christmas Day, the spike in shopping activity on Christmas night is certainly a new trend worth exploring.
In the U.S., similar shifts in shopping behavior occurred. Most notable was a spike in shopping activity at 10:00 p.m. EST Thanksgiving Day, the night before the renowned Black Friday. There was also a spike in shopping activity on November 30, the night before the busiest U.S. online shopping day, Cyber Monday. To gather these results, SLI studied e-commerce site activity across 500 retailer websites in the U.S. (100 were Internet Retailer Top 1,000 retailers), analyzing 45 million queries during Thanksgiving week.
Consumers (increasingly online night owls) are beating retailers to the punch on unexpected days and times. By timing key promotions accordingly, savvy online retailers can take advantage of these new opportunities and have a jump on their competition in 2015.
