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Nearly three-fourths of U.S. consumers claimed to shop on Cyber Monday, and another 73 respondents reported they sometimes shop on Cyber Monday, according to a Clustrix survey of more than 500 consumers.
Arguably the largest online shopping day of the year, Cyber Monday captures the attention of almost 90 percent of the respondents.
According to the survey, 45 percent of respondents start shopping for the holidays a month in advance, and almost 40 percent of respondents start shopping a week in advance.
Moreover, the amount of traffic flooding these Websites around holiday season is continuing to grow. Almost all of the respondents were familiar with limited-time sale event Websites, like HauteLook, nomorerack and Gilt Groupe.
An overwhelming four-fifths (80.9 percent) reported that they also subscribe to such Websites, and just six percent of respondents were unfamiliar with these limited-time sale event Websites.
In fact, HauteLook, a company owned by Nordstrom, had more than 17 million members at the beginning of 2014, a 3 million rise over the year before.
One of the more interesting findings revealed that almost 70 percent (355 respondents) of survey respondents would either leave a meeting, or shop online during a meeting, to get a limited-time offer.
“I see mobile app usage and online shopping expanding rapidly in the near future. Over the next five years, Forrester Research predicts marketing will spend $189 billion to build the back-end of mobile apps,” Tony Barbagallo, chief marketing officer at Clustrix, told eWEEK. “That being said, our survey results showed a relatively new online-shopping trend. We found consumers are largely focused on food-related purchases via mobile. Almost two-thirds of respondents claim to have purchased prepared meals or have had meals delivered to them from vendors like Munchery, Eat24, SpoonRocket, Caviar and GrubHub.”
While a little less than half of respondents (46.39 percent) shop online in the morning, the other half are split relatively even between shopping in the afternoon and in the evening.
More than 40 percent (223 respondents) of those surveyed claimed to shop online on a daily basis and almost 30 percent (144 respondents) claimed to shop online on a weekly basis.
Almost 75 percent of those surveyed have ordered groceries from online vendors like Safeway, Instacart, Costco and Amazon, to name just a few.
The second largest category for online purchases was clothing, shoes and accessories, with nearly 50 percent of respondents claiming to have purchased these items online.
Only a small fraction of respondents, less than 10 percent, said that they don’t use their mobile devices to make purchases at all, with seven percent claiming they only use it for general shopping related searches.
Moreover, almost 50 percent of those surveyed reported that they would shop elsewhere if a website has slowly loading pages.
For example, Amazon found that every 100 milliseconds of downtime cost them one percent in sales, and Google found that an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped site traffic by 20 percent.
When it comes to security breaches at major corporations like Target, Home Depot and others dissuading potential online consumers, however, Barbagallo said don’t bet on it.
“I don’t think high profile security breaches of consumer data will significantly impact consumers from shopping online,” he said. “That train has left the station.”
