Tepid Task Completion on Cyber Monday
Following up on our last post about tumbling task completion on Black Friday, we found marginally higher yet still tepid task completion results for websites running 4Q on Cyber Monday 2008. The aggregate task completion rate for retail and e-commerce websites stood at 67%, up 2 points from the Black Friday figure, but still sharply lower than the November average of 70%.
While sites continue to founder in their collective ability to shepherd visitors through to successful online outcomes, they are also facing declining traffic, as economic contraction shrinks the pool of discretionary dollars that customers can tap into to fund their purchases. Hitwise reported that the number of U.S. visits to the top 500 retail Web sites decreased 1% from Cyber Monday 2007. The same report revealed that traffic to comparison shopping websites dropped by a whopping 21%. At the same time, Silicon Alley Insider reported that the year-over-year growth rate for Cyber Monday sales plummeted from 21% last year to 2.4% this year.
Other data suggest that customer satisfaction for online retailers on Cyber Monday fell year-over-year. Curiously, in the release there is a quote suggesting that retailers and investors should in some way be heartened by this data, because they suggest that things will not be as bad as expected. It's a very sanguine outlook to have, for sure, but it's out of sync with most of the data that is now emerging.
Update: In the interest of transparency, we must note that after this post went live, comScore released data suggesting that the heavy discounts and subventions offered by e-tailers on Cyber Monday yielded impressive results. They reported that e-commerce spending on Cyber Monday jumped 15% y-o-y, up to $846 million. So, the picture is rosier than initially painted, but the fact remains that there are still millions of untapped dollars out there, and had sites been better optimized for the 33% of shoppers who did not complete their tasks on Cyber Monday, spending could easily have been over the billion dollar mark.
