Black Friday Turns Gray This November According to Newest U.S. Retail Benchmarks Report from Euclid

SAN FRANCISCO – December 5, 2014 – Euclid, the leader of in-store retail analytics, today releases its monthly retail benchmarks report to analyze shopper activity and behavior during the month of November. This month’s report measured data from tens of millions of domestic shopping sessions to reveal that shopping activity increased slightly from October, but slumped compared to November last year.

Traffic lagged significantly throughout the month, with Black Friday also failing to match last year as deals were more distributed across time and channels. In-store engagement improved, with average duration up and bounce rate down, as the shoppers that did visit the store had a strong intent to buy.

Euclid asserts that its metrics illustrate a modest outlook for industry revenues, and estimates sales growth in the following retail verticals of:

·       1.3% growth year-over-year in general merchandise, apparel, furniture and other (GAFO) retail sales

·       0.1% decline year-over-year in clothing and apparel sales

·       0.6% growth year-over-year in general merchandise sales

Here are some of Euclid’s top findings in this month’s report around shopper behavior metrics:

·       Shopper traffic declined twenty percent compared to the same month last year as in-store shopper activity was cannibalized by online and mobile shopping sessions

·       Storefront conversion was up two percent year-over-year, benefitting from omni-channel consumers and the success of attractive promotions

·       Duration increased ten percent from last year as a result of increased willingness to browse and explore merchandise. Consumer sentiment and discretionary income have improved greatly from the environment of macro headwinds seen last year

·       Repeat visits declined one percent due to omni-channel shoppers accomplishing more purchases in fewer store trips

The best shopping day of November was Friday the 21st, one week before Black Friday. The 21st actually saw an increase in traffic and storefront conversion compared to the previous year. In addition, significantly longer durations show this was a much more utilized shopping day than it was last year. On the other hand, Monday the 17th was the worst shopping day of the month. Traffic was very low and few outside consumers were attracted into the store.

Black Friday:

Black Friday was yet again the busiest day of the month in absolute terms, seeing the most shoppers in the store. However, Thanksgiving Day promotions did appear to steal some of the deal chasing activity away. Compared to last year, traffic declined 6.6% on Black Friday. The decline was driven by deep discounts beginning much earlier in the month and continuing after BlackFriday. It appears that some consumers felt less frantic about catching deals as they expect them to continue throughout the rest of the season.

To view the complete findings, download the full report on shopper activity for the month of November here: http://info.euclidanalytics.com/WC14-11USRB_Reg_RLP.html 

About Euclid 

Euclid provides answers and insights to brick and mortar retailers in the same way that web analytics services do for e-commerce. Euclid helps retailers quantify offline impact of marketing, optimize store performance, and understand customer behavior. As of November 2014 Euclid’s network has grown to capture billions of measurements per day, analyzing hundreds of millions of potential shopping sessions per year across thousands of locations. Only anonymous, non-personal data is ever collected and only aggregated trend data is used for analysis