Criteo reveals online spending habits during Ramadan

Ramadan is rapidly approaching us and as the festive season kicks in, so do people’s online buying habits. Criteo recently released seasonal data for said buying habits and the findings are pretty interesting.

The data was pulled from eCommerce sites across South East Asia, and as Raya draws closer, there’s a marked increase in users purchasing things from eCommerce sites like Lazada and Zalora for example. The findings are based on 1.5 million transactions across Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore; during and after Ramadan 2015.

Average transactions spiked by 128 percent (equating to about a 75 percent increase in traffic) by the second and third weeks of Ramadan in 2015, and it’s probably going to be higher. There’s also a fair bit of “last minute shopping” as the final week is still higher in traffic compared to the early bird shoppers on the first week.

We also initially thought that items like clothing and gifts would be the highest on the list, but turns out we’re pretty wrong. Instead, sales of handheld devices (such as mobile phones and tablets) saw a dramatic rise, followed by watches, household goods and clothing. Granted all categories got quite a boost in sales during the holidays, but the fact that gadgets are taking the lead in terms of purchases only shows that smart devices are pretty much in the vogue as gifts.

Not to mention there tends to be a lot of special holiday deals as well, which likely further spur on purchases.

Another interesting thing to note is that more people are accessing eCommerce sites on multiple devices, not only web. Combined with many platforms supporting mobile apps, there’s also be a rise in transactions on mobile, showing that people are getting more comfortable doing their shopping on their phones. People will still access sites through traditional web browsers, but it looks like more are going to be on mobile from where on out.

Do you make a lot of online purchases during the holiday seasons? let us know in the comments which is your fave ways to go about it.

[SOURCE]