Black Friday Solid For Online Retailers, Social Media Impact Shows Up in Bounce Rate Data

According to data and analysis from Coremetrics (link below), U.S. retailers had a solid start to the 2009 holiday season. Coremetrics tracks data from more than 500 top retailers, so the measures are significant enough to be deeply encouraging.

Here were some of the key data points:

The average dollar value that consumers spent per online order rose 35 percent year over year, from an average of $126 last year to over $170 this year.
Consumers are buying more items per order than they did last year-by 18.3 percent. The average jumped to 5.4 vs. 4.56 a year ago.
The percentage of consumers who completed an order jumped from 3.49 percent last year to 4.5 percent this year.
Consumers are spending considerably less time browsing retailers' sites, suggesting they had done their research prior to Black Friday and that they are shopping from lists. "Bounce rate" which signifies the number of visitors to any given site who only view a single page, jumped almost 40 percent vs. 2008.

I find the last data point to be really interesting. Analogous to how Twitter's direct web traffic has gone down due to use of tools off of Twitter's web site, I believe that much of the increased bounce rate was due to influence on shoppers from other sites including social networks. We are likely witnessing the significant impacts of social media and social discovery on the online shopping process as external sites and tools are used heavily to spread the word about deals and product feedback.

I will continue to watch these trends closely. As I've said before, I believe that we will see some profound impacts from social media and the beginnings of social commerce this holiday season.

Alex Hawkinson