Last year I did a post on the transactions that we saw related to online shopping on Cyber Monday - as I indicated in the past, yes there is a spike. And looking at the transactions this year, again we notice a spike:
You can see the cyclic nature of the work week given that we handle enterprise traffic. The Y-axis values are is the monthly percentage of online shopping/auction transactions. So Cyber Monday made up 7.51% of the November 2011 shopping transactions and Black Friday made up 3.82%. The average for the month was 3.57%, excluding weekends the average for the month was 4.53%. These stats look at web transactions from a "micro" level - looking at a a longer-term trend across Black Friday and Cyber Monday online shopping transactions:
We notice a downward trend in online shopping transactions from 2009-2011 Black Fridays and that online shopping transactions have remained fairly static from 2009-2011. In this case the Y-axis is the percentage of online shopping transactions for the day - for example, 4.63% of this Cyber Monday's transactions were online shopping. The precise numbers for the other Cyber Mondays were 4.68% in 2009 and 4.61% in 2010. So there was a 0.05% decrease from 2009 to 2010 and a 0.02% increase in 2011. Given the general increase in online shopping vendors, general awareness of "Cyber Monday", and people being more comfortable making online purchases I would expect Cyber Monday online shopping to noticeably trend upward. Black Friday online shopping trended downward year over year, and we see the Cyber Monday downturn in 2010 and the slightest increase / stagnation in 2011 -- these online shopping stats may provide an indication as to the health of the economy.
