Opera: Weekends are Optimal for Online Shopping

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Craig Smith  |  Founder & CEO

In a world where the importance of mobile optimization is being increasingly vocalized, brands are still experiencing a low number of online sales and conversions through mobile products. A new study from Opera Software, however, aimed to better explain the shopping behaviors of consumers while browsing and buying through mobile and desktop devices.

Opera Software’s report compared traffic and conversions through different platforms for each day of the week, and their research produced a few interesting discoveries. First off, while the holidays are always thought of as the most popular time of the year to shop online, Opera found that June was the month which experienced the highest global volume of traffic to mobile shopping sites. On a weekly basis, it appears that mobile traffic to ecommerce sites spikes on Sundays, while desktop traffic is highest on Mondays. Overall, shopping traffic tends to be more consistent and strong on weekdays; however, Friday experiences the lowest number of mobile visits. The company explains this phenomenon with a notion that shoppers tend to research and browse on their mobile devices on weekends, but add the the actual purchasing of the item to do their to do lists during the week.

comScore’s data from September 2014 seemed to echo this trend. In their study, comScore found that even though users spent far more time on mobile than desktop (66% of average time spent vs. 34%), an overwhelming majority of sales were completed on desktop (89% of dollars spent vs. 11%).

While MarketLive published a similar report in the first Quarter of 2014, their findings were slightly different. The study found that traffic on tablets in particular was highest during the weekend, and Sundays especially experienced a slightly higher conversion rate than any other day. Mondays and Saturdays were tied, making up 15% of the average weekly revenue.

Interestingly, Sundays also saw a conversion peak from smartphone users, with a rate of .65%. Conversely, the largest share of weekly revenues came on Thursdays, which solidifies Opera’s theory about week vs. weekend spending.

How can your retail company benefit from this knowledge? Perhaps your marketing and sales department can coordinate timely discounts, promotions or special offerings to cater to smartphone, tablet and desktop users on these days to capture audiences and incite site visits and order purchases more effectively.

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