Submitted by Eileen Haggerty, NetScout Director of Product marketing
Thanksgiving is over, and now the mad dash to the Christmas season is upon us – made all that much more frantic this year by the shorter 27 days between the two holidays, versus 33 last year, and because of the tighter economic times we are faced with this year. So while avoiding the actual crowds in the stores this past weekend, I did do a little web surfing and discovered some interesting shopping facts.
Black Friday has come and gone and early survey results from the National Retail Federation (NRF) are reporting that it was a good day, better than expected, in fact. The stats tell the story best:
- 73.6 million stores and website shoppers on Friday (looking for those door busters no doubt!)
- 172 million shoppers overall for the long weekend compared to 147 million last year
- Per-shopper spending up 7.2 percent - $372.57 this weekend compared to $347.55 last year
- 34 percent did their shopping over the Internet
So the results thus far are promising for the holiday season. And here we are – Cyber Monday, a phrase coined in 2005 by Shop.org because retailers reported seeing incremental additional e-commerce traffic to their sites on the Monday following Thanksgiving. The day is marked by online sales, deeper discounts, and free shipping offers by over 83 percent of participating retailers this year, according to NRF. And traffic this year is expected to be high today as well.
Of note, the projection by Shop.org’s survey is that nearly 56% of employees in offices with Internet access will use their corporate network to shop online – representing almost 73 million people. Perhaps more interesting is the demographic breakdown - 70 percent employees in the 18 to 34 age range reported that they will likely shop over the Internet today and believe it or not, men are 60 percent more likely to shop online today from the office than women at around 51 percent.
How should employers feel about this? Hard to say – as with most situations, this is a double edged sword – you are happy that your employees don’t go out and take an unexpected long lunch to do some shopping at the mall. Certainly 10 or 15 minutes of search, point, click, checkout online is much less disruptive. But, depending on your network, the additional load could in fact be disruptive, impacting some of the organizations’ business applications using the same Internet access.
For more information check out information regarding business vs. recreational use in the network.
We’re curious – are you shopping online today? From your office? How much time would you say it saves you from going to the mall? Let us know --
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