Cyber Weekend continues to be most lucrative retail period of the year, but there is a large population of frequent online shoppers who avoid spending between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. Slice Intelligence looked at shoppers who bought six or more items online this year and found that nearly 50 percent of them didn't participate in Cyber Weekend. Data shows that hold-outs aren't driven by holiday season sales, as their online spending stays relatively constant throughout the year.
Cyber Weekend hold-outs use the internet for subscriptions and take-out
One reason these shoppers avoid Cyber Weekend may be due to the fact that they use the online marketplace primarily for subscriptions and meal delivery services. This is clearly seen in the manual shaving category; more than half of Bevel's buyers avoided the online shopping holiday, while over a third of Harry's and Dollar Shave Club subscribers did so as well. Similarly meal delivery services like UberEats and GrubHub have a large population of users who avoided Cyber Weekend, indicating that these people are shopping online for convenience moreso than products.
When Cyber hold-outs do shop, they go for electronics
When Cyber Weekend hold-outs buy products online they tend to buy electronics. Thirty-one percent of electronics and accessories sales in the last 11 months were from this group. This group also account for 30 percent of the spend in the automotive and grocery categories.
Cyber Weekend hold-outs live outside large cities
Nearly half of regular online shoppers who didn't spend over Cyber Weekend live outside of a large metropolitan area. A higher proportion of shoppers from the U.S.'s top 10 metropolitan areas – roughly 46 percent– participated in Cyber Weekend.
About this data
With a panel of over 4.4 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.
Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.
Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.