My favorite headline about the holiday shopping season came from a piece in the Dallas Morning news which claimed “Holiday Shopping Has Turned Into Something More Civilized.” Maybe. Or maybe we’ve realized that waiting in long lines in store, circling for parking and the allure of in-store sales can’t beat sitting on the couch in pajamas with your iPhone.
At OpenUp we tracked online holiday shopping over an 8–10 week period so we could understand how shopping behavior changed for consumers over the holiday season. Users shared both desktop and mobile browsing data. Our audience is female, millennial and has individual incomes that skew between 2 to 5% higher than U.S. census profiles for this demographic group.
Amazon FTW
Okay so not surprising that Amazon won the holidays. But the giant retailer claimed that 2016 was its best year ever. Our audience agreed. 40% of our our audience visited Amazon on a daily basis during the holiday season compared to only 7% visiting the other top 4 retailers daily.
Most significantly as we got closer to Christmas day (and Hanukkah this year) while visits to other retailers dropped, Amazon kept steady. Our theory: Consumers have more faith that Amazon will ship in time for Christmas.
A good contrast to how much shipping times influence shopping is Etsy. The maker platform out performed traditional retailers like Macy’s or Nordstrom this holiday season among our largely female, millennial audience. 6.6% of our audience visited Etsy daily during the lead-up to the holidays and saw an average of 20 pages per visit.
But Etsy is not for the last minute shopper. While Amazon was made for those who procrastinate (1 out of 4 of us according to a study that was five years late), visits to Etsy dropped 25% in the 5 days leading up to Christmas. Visits to Amazon only dropped by 4%.
Macy’s, Nordstrom and Sephora were the other top 3 retailers visited by our audience. Peak online shopping happened during the Black Friday weekend with shopping online dropping between 14 to 32 percent in the 5 days leading up to Christmas. This may have been off-set by in-store visits.
The Brand’s That Were On Santa’s Wishlist
I recently caused a row on Facebook for admiring an article that equated wearing yoga pants to work, cocktails or anywhere besides the gym to bad manners. Point noted — athleisure is here to stay.
These athleisure brands were among the few to achieve statistically significant market share with our audience.
Apple vs Samsung — there is no competition among millennial American women. I think our data would look different if we tracked more men. (Stay tuned for 2017 updates!)
Great consumer deals on Black Friday combined with strong interest in the Victoria Secret Fashion show that aired December 5th, and the angels owned holiday shopping.
Some people asked for a car this Christmas — and nice ones to boot. BMW and Audi were among the two most popular car brands.
OpenUp tracked browsing — mobile and desktop data for 904 women from October 17th going forward. Users are incentivized to share their data. The OpenUp audience is more than 60% millennial and skews higher for individual income than U.S. census.
Got ideas of what we should write about next? We’d love to hear from you. Email hi@open-up.io.
And you can contribute data to the OpenUp brand tracking project by downloading our extension HERE.
Writing by Ashwini Anburajan — follow on Twitter @anburajan
Data by Bryan Sim — follow on Twitter @fluxandcadence
