The summer of 2016 is feeling remarkably similar to 1997 with the press covering stories about the Clintons, Pokémon, and the release of a brand-new Harry Potter book. The series’ newest installment, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, translated into big sales--particularly on Amazon, which accounted for 90 percent of dollars spent on the book--and also spurred the popularity of other Harry Potter titles, which tripled in sales.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was the most popular of the original series bought online since the Cursed Child was released last Sunday, with the third installment of the series, The Prisoner of Azkaban, coming in second.
Preorders account for the majority of Cursed Child sales
Shoppers eagerly anticipated the release of The Cursed Child as 60 percent of the book's sales came from preorders. Still, the book's official release date was its largest single sales day, accounting for 17 percent of its online sales to date.
Millennials help levitate half of Cursed Child sales
Forty-five percent of online shoppers who purchased the newest Harry Potter book are millennials, the cohort that grew up with the original series in the late 1990s.
About this data
With a panel of over 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.