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Black Friday, By The Numbers
Akamai, tracking total Internet activity on Black Friday, said traffic peaked at about 6.7 million visitors per minute at around noon New York time. Of that traffic, about 4 million visitors per minute were coming from North America. On Black Friday 2008, global retail traffic peaked at about 6 million visitors per minute, of which about 3 million visitors per minute came from North America, according to Akamai.
Web performance company Gomez said sites run by Nike and J. Crew, which experienced a rough 2008 holiday season in terms of downtime, had the fastest homepage load times during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2009 period, “while Toys”R”Us and Victoria’s Secret ranked below average.” The J. Crew site “also did the best in terms of delivering a consistently strong experience for all customers–whether across the world or across the street,” Gomez said, adding that “availability across the retailers was strong overall, with the exception of Kohl’s.” Kohls.com’s main problems happened early on Black Friday, but it continued to struggle with slight glitches on Cyber Monday.
“Office Depot and Office Max led the pack in terms of how long it takes to complete an end-to-end sales transaction,” Gomez found. Interestingly, it pointed out that “Amazon.com, widely regarded as a best-in-class performer, was below average.”
Gomez also issued some M-Commerce findings related to the big shopping weekend, stating that Best Buy “delivered the strongest mobile Web experience in terms of both response time (speed of page downloads) and availability,” and it pointed out that “the wide discrepancy in mobile Web site response times suggests that retailers still have work to do when it comes to optimizing mobile Web performance.”
A Black Friday survey conducted by GIGresearch for the NRF found that 195 million shoppers visited stores and Web sites between November 26 and November 28, up from 172 million last year. “However, the average spending over the weekend dropped to $343.31 per person from $372.57 a year ago,” the NRF said, adding that 28.5 percent of those surveyed said they shopped online.
-Marc
December 2nd, 2009 at 10:42 am
Wow, I’m not sure if this story is good or bad news. Looks like online retail will be the shining star this holiday season as the numbers at the physical store aren’t so full of good cheer. This story also confirms what we already know, Amazon is a key player in online shopping and they set the standard for customer experience. I beleive that this seasons results will change the way Black Friday is deployed next year. All that work for a zero margin day does not make for successful retailing.