It’s universal: We all love to exchange gifts. Singles’ Day and Diwali are two more reasons to do so.

There is scientific evidence that humans secrete “feel good” chemicals in their brain, such as serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin, while giving. So it’s no wonder that many of us look forward to the holidays. Online mobile shopping trends for Singles’ Day and Diwali certainly confirm that. Sadly, cybercriminals also mark their calendars.

If you don’t know… Singles’ Day celebrates single people on November 11th (11/11). It is an unofficial holiday in China and the world’s biggest shopping day. This year it was Double 11 as it was the 11th anniversary of the holiday. Diwali is the Indian festival of lights and this year it was celebrated on November 14.

Our friends at Forrester made some fascinating predictions about unique buyer behaviors for these two holidays. You can find the Singles’ Day blog here and the Diwali blog here. How close were those predictions? Spot on! Forrester predicted record participation for this year’s Double 11 as more product categories than ever took part in these promotions. Brands and retailers utilized live streaming leading up to the event which allowed for participation worldwide. The inclusion of several US companies for this year’s online shopping festival also contributed to consumer engagement globally.

If we look at trends among our retail customers across our platform this year, it’s obvious that shopping patterns shifted dramatically in the face of regional stay-at-home orders and limitations in the availability of brick-and-mortar shops.

On Singles’ Day, the daily hits to ecommerce sites was up 54% when compared to Singles’ day 2019. And, while the pandemic has seen major shifts in consumer behavior favoring ecommerce, traffic on Singles Day was also much higher than the daily average so far this year.

We also examined YoY trends for the month leading up to and including Singles’ Day; October 11th through November 11th for 2019 and 2020. Among our retail customers, during that time period, the average daily hits increased by 48.8%.

For Diwali, we looked at the 30 days leading up to the holiday for India only and compared that timeframe from 2019 to 2020; we saw the average daily hits increase a remarkable 46.2%.

Some specific highlights:

You guessed it…mobile shopping has increased again this year. For Singles’ Day, it jumped from 55.2% in 2019 to 69.31% in 2020. For Diwali, it jumped from 59.55% to 75.48%.

On the security front, credential stuffing attacks increased by a whopping 83% over last year on Singles’ Day and 75% on Diwali – as retail continues to be one of the most attractive industries for threat actors.

At Akamai, we are constantly working with our retail customers to better serve them, particularly over the holiday seasons. We look at several trends, including but not limited to:

• Shoppers on mobile versus desktop
• Operating systems, devices, and browsers used by mobile shoppers
• Conversion rates by device
• Bounce rates by device
• Web application attacks by type
• Bot attacks — including country source and targets

You can find all of the data that we evaluated and visual infographics for both Singles’ Day and Diwali on akamai.com/retail.

The two most important takeaways from the trends that we examined: your sites have to be optimized for mobile and you need to protect your customers when they trust you with their personal details.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Akamai Blog authored by Tara Bartley. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAkamaiBlog/~3/NU2aAGLBspc/its-universal-we-all-love-to-exchange-gifts-singles-day-and-diwali-are-two-more-reasons-to-do-so.html