All the studies and reports are out on how the big box stores did on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, there is far less data when it comes to the smaller merchants and how their sales performed.

As we did last year when we examined Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales, we analyzed general order trends for a random sampling of our ecommerce clients for the start of this holiday shopping season.

Here are the results…

Our data

As I’m not a full-time statistics guy, our data gathering is quite simple. It does show a representative trend for our ecommerce merchants though. We pull data on a random sampling of ShopSite ecommerce stores (around 300 or so).

The criterion is each store must get at least 5 orders a day on average. We measure the number of orders received in a day, the number of stores sampled, and compute a simple average of the number of orders placed per day.

What we saw

Below is a graph showing the average number of orders received per day. It looks at the time-frame November 1st through December 4th:

Avg. # of orders per day (click image to enlarge)

A few conclusions

• Cyber Monday blew all the other days out of the water – Our small merchants saw on average a 70% jump in sales on Cyber Monday. It was easily the best performing day of the holiday shopping season (so far).

• Black Friday is like a regular Monday – Although Black Friday sales were up over a typical Friday, the volume wasn’t much more than a typical Monday for our ecommerce clients.

• Monday is big for small merchants – I’ve read reports saying Tuesday is the biggest day of the week for online sales. Our data points to Monday being the biggest day of the week for sales during non-holiday time periods.

Your thoughts?

We’ll re-visit these stats in mid-January with a look at sales from November through early January to see how the trends rise and fall.

What are your thoughts with regards to small merchants and online sales? Have you seen things that differ from the graph above? Please let us know.