If Every Day is Cyber Monday, Will There Be a Holiday Shopping Season At All?

Use 2019 as an indicator, but bear 2020 patterns of activity in mind

2020 has been an unpredictable year for a number of reasons, including the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we approach the 2020 holiday shopping season, we can expect the unexpected to continue. Although we can anticipate that families will indeed shop more online around the holiday season this year and that retailers will have promotions, the patterns we observed in e-commerce this year have shown that what lies before us is more uncharted territory. Rather than attempting to predict the exact future of consumer behavior and e-commerce, let’s look at the trends and indicators of the past year to determine where businesses ought to focus their strategies for the holidays.

Putting Last Year’s Holiday Shopping Season Into Perspective

During the Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping period in 2019, U.S. online retail sales hit $28.49 billion, up 17.7% from $24.21 the year before, per Adobe Analytics. During November 2019, PerimeterX found that 94% of total login attempts on e-commerce sites were malicious and blocked them, dramatically reducing the load and risk to our customers’ infrastructure. This enabled our customers to realize blockbuster online revenue surpassing $5 billion for the five-day period. With visits from smartphones growing 19% year-over-year and accounting for 54% of traffic to retail websites, it was critical for our customers to have a superior bot mitigation solution protecting both web and mobile applications.

In November 2019, PerimeterX found that 94% of total login attempts on e-commerce sites were malicious and blocked them. Note: This graph is shown on a logarithmic scale.

Fraud-related direct-losses stemming from account takeover (ATO) and carding range in the billions of dollars. However, the total financial impact from the threat of these attacks (Read more...)