Hitwise Intelligence - Analyst Weblogs

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that the US Unemployment rate just has dropped to 8.6%, the lowest rate since March 2009. Similarly, the market share of visits to state and informational websites about unemployment decreased 18% year over year while visits to job search websites are up 9% during the same time period. Some of the waning visits to unemployment websites may be attributed to the jobless where unemployment benefits have expired and the uptick in visits to job search websites highlights that there are plenty of job seekers out there.

In comparing the search terms driving traffic to unemployment websites year over year, the term “unemployment benefits” experienced a 25% increase in search clicks. Online users are still heavily searching for unemployment benefits by state, in particular Ohio and New York. Georgia and Florida also appeared in the top searches related to unemployment, two states with rates above the national unemployment rate.

When comparing the visitors of employment websites with unemployment websites, “Hope for Tomorrow” was the Mosaic 2011 Type that over-indexed against the online population for visiting the websites of unemployment websites as well as employment listings. Using Experian Mosaic Lifestyle segmentation, a household-based consumer lifestyle segmentation system that classifies all U.S. households and neighborhoods into unique segments, we can understand a more robust view of online consumers who are visiting these websites, including their preferences and habits. For example, the “Hope for Tomorrow” Mosaic Type is characterized as young, single parents living modest lifestyles in smaller cities. Likewise, “Meager Metro Means” and “Rolling the Dice” are also most likely to be visiting both employment and unemployment websites; both groups are described as lower educated urban dwellers with low incomes.

Thanks to Lauren Rice, an Analyst with the Strategic Services team at Experian Hitwise for today's analysis.

The holiday season is fast approaching and there are numerous commercials heavily promoting layaway as an option for consumers. The share of searches for the portfolio of retail-related layaway terms peaked much earlier, the week ending October 22, 2011 and was up 121% from the previous years’ peak in layaway terms which occurred the week ending November 27, 2010. This earlier activity is due to heavy advertising campaigns by major retailers to promote layaway options for the holiday season.

Custom analysis of those searching for “layaway” terms during the 12 weeks ending November 12th revealed that 63% of these online users have a VantageScore of D or F, indicating they are not a credit-worthy group of consumers. They are also most likely to be between the ages of 18 – 34 (64%), female (59%) and, compared with the general online population, over index on living in Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky and West Virginia.

Kmart and Wal-Mart, two retailers which are heavily advertising layaway via television ads, are the top recipients of traffic from layaway search terms for the most recent 12 rolling week period (December 3, 2011). Kmart is paying for nearly half of these search clicks, while all of Wal-Mart’s search traffic is driven by organic clicks. Overall, the volume of search clicks to Wal-Mart from layaway terms increased nearly 30 times year over year and five of the top ten layaway search terms include variations of Wal-Mart.

Thanks to Lauren Rice, an Analyst with the Strategic Services team at Experian Hitwise for today's analysis.

I mentioned in one of my last blogs that we have some exciting product developments in the pipeline here at Hitwise. Hot on the heels of the official launch of Dashboards 2.0 is the release of two new additions to the clickstream tool: click reliance and click departure.

Our clickstream data shows the user journey through the web with upstream visits (where did a user come from before visiting a website) and downstream visits (where did a user go to after visiting a website). Click reliance and click departure help to bring a more complete clickstream picture together in one easy to use report.

We’ve put together a short YouTube video tutorial on how to use the new clickstream metrics but I thought I would go through one of the examples in the blog as well to demonstrate the usefulness of this new report.

A lot of our clients are interested in Facebook and how they can engage with the UK’s largest social network to drive traffic to their website, so I’ve chosen Facebook to demonstrate click reliance in action. Looking at a highly competitive industry like online fashion retail we can see how the top retailers compare for the volume of traffic they receive from Facebook using the downstream tool.

What this shows is that of all the visits leaving Facebook, Topshop is the biggest recipient from the Apparel and Accessoreis category. What this also shows is that there are four fashion retailers closely grouped together – Topshop, ASOS, Next and New Look – which receive roughly the same amount of traffic from Facebook. But which of these retailers is most reliant on Facebook as an online channel?

By clicking on the “Metric” dropdown in the Hitwise tool you can now highlight “Clicks and Click Reliance” which will generate a new clickstream report.

This click reliance report shows how the different fashion retailers depend on traffic from Facebook. What’s interesting here is that although Next and New Look get almost exactly the same volume of traffic from Facebook, New Look is much more reliant on that traffic as a proportion of its total visits than Next. The traffic that Next receives from Facebook accounts for just over 5% of the total visits coming to Next, whereas for New Look, nearly 10% of its traffic comes directly from Facebook. What this shows is that Facebook is an important channel for Next, but not nearly as important as it is for New Look.

Click departure works in a similar way to click reliance but starts with the upstream data and then adds the downstream data to the overall view. In the example below I have started with the upstream websites visited before the Insurance category filtered by a custom category of financial aggregators.

What this example shows is that although MoneySupermarket is the biggest financial aggregator sending traffic to the insurance websites, with 1.56% of all visits to the Insurance category in October 2011 coming from MoneySupermarket. However, looking at the click departure metric we can see that MoneySupermarket sends just over 12% of its total traffic to insurance websites whereas GoCompare is much more focused on this industry with nearly 30% of all visits leaving GoCompare going straight to an insurance website.

We have more cool stuff coming in the next few months so keep tuned to the blog for the latest product updates and data insights. We're also introducing more tutorials on how to use Hitwise on our YouTube channel which is a great way to demonstrate the power of the tool.

Follow Hitwise on Twitter.

Yesterday (5 December), millions of consumers went online for Cyber Monday to do their Christmas shopping. We predicted last week that there would be 85 million visits to online retail websites on Cyber Monday and yesterday we monitored 84.6 million visits, 18% up on last year’s figure of 72 million visits.

In total, 14 million hours were spent shopping online by UK Internet users yesterday, spending an average of 10 minutes per visit to each retail website. The result is a new record for online retail websites for pre-Christmas shopping. However, like last year, we are expecting the biggest online shopping day overall to be Boxing Day (26 December) as consumers look to spend Christmas money and vouchers, as well as browsing ahead of the post-Christmas sales.

Looking at the websites that have increased their market share of visits between Cyber Monday 2010 and 2011, it was the online-only giants Amazon and eBay that were leading the charge. Amazon UK accounted for 10% of all visits to retailers yesterday whereas last Cyber Monday it had 8.49% of all visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category.

There was marked growth for eBay UK’s mobile site as traffic tripled year-on-year. This was in part due to eBay’s pop-up store in London’s Oxford Street. The shop encouraged window-shoppers to scan QR codes into their smartphones and tablets in order to buy one of the top 350 eBay bestsellers.

Also among the fast movers, were price comparison sites LowPriceShopper and SupaPrice, as well as daily deals site Groupon UK. This could perhaps indicate that there will be an increased dependence on discount bargain hunting this Christmas. ASDA also had two websites in the fast movers although we are expecting much higher visits to grocery websites as we get closer to Christmas Day itself.

Keep following the blog and Twitter for more Christmas insights, and don’t forget we are running the second of our Christmas webinar trilogy on Tuesday 20 December which you can sign up for now for free.

It’s December and although at Hitwise we’ve been talking about Christmas since August now the festive season truly begins.

We’ve run a number of webinars in the lead up to Christmas which detail how we think online retailers will fare this year, highlighting where the biggest opportunities exist and which toys will be the most popular stocking fillers. Throughout Christmas we’ll also be sharing our top facts and predictions via Twitter and the blog. Today I’ll be focusing on Cyber Monday (5 December) which we’re confidently predicting will be the biggest pre-Christmas online shopping day of the year.

There has been a lot in the news recently about when UK consumers will be doing their Christmas shopping online. Monday 21 November dubbed “Mega Monday” was touted as the biggest pre-Christmas shopping day according to Kelkoo but we’ve already seen UK Internet visits to online retailers surpass those figures, with daily Internet visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category reach 83 million on 28 November (compared to 76 million on 21 November).

Black Friday (25 November) was also talked up as a big pre-Christmas sales day but this is primarily an American promotion as it falls on the day after Thanksgiving. You can see that in the UK there were 73 million visits to online retailers on 25 November, considerably less than Monday 28 November. Last year on Cyber Monday (6 December 2010) we saw 72 million visits to online retailers from UK Internet users, a number which has already been eclipsed this year. We’re expecting next Monday’s figures to be in the region of 85 million visits – a new record for online pre-Christmas shopping.

Follow the blog and our seasonal insights on Twitter for the latest Christmas updates. Don’t forget we’ll also be running a special Christmas webinar on Tuesday 20 December which is part two of our Christmas trilogy taking you through the Christmas season so far, and the upcoming trends for the post-Christmas sales.

It’s December and as people crack open the first windows on their Advent calendars we thought we would make some predictions for Christmas 2011. In true festive fashion we’ve plumped for the 12 Insights of Christmas, and not a gold ring or partridge in sight.

The 12 Insights of Christmas 2011

1. This December 350 million hours will be spent shopping online by the UK Internet population. This translates to an average of 8 hours and 45 minutes spent per person on shopping websites over the course of the month.

2. 2.1 billion visits will go to online retail sites in December with new record peaks in traffic both pre and post-Christmas.

3. Lego will be the most searched for toy this Christmas, in particular Lego Star Wars games and sets.

4. Cyber Monday (5 December) will be the biggest pre-Christmas shopping day online with 85 million visits to retail websites from UK Internet users.

5. Monday 19 December will be the biggest day of December for online Grocery visits as people do some last minute food shopping but also check store opening times across the Christmas period.

6. iPhones will be a third more popular online than iPads this Christmas. If search intent was reflected in sales, for every 3 iPads Apple sold this Christmas they would sell 4 iPhones.

7. Facebook will see a new peak in UK Internet visits as friends share messages of good will with one another. 25 million hours will be spent on Facebook on Christmas Day alone.

8. Searches for the post-Christmas sales will start earlier than ever this year, with eager shoppers starting to do their research online as early as Christmas Eve.

9. Friday 23 December will be the biggest day of December for retailers receiving traffic from email as the multi-channel retailers prepare their customers for the post-Christmas sales.

10. The fashion sector will be the most reliant on Facebook traffic this Christmas, with TopShop, River Island and ASOS among the biggest recipients of Facebook traffic.

11. 12 million hours will be spent watching video clips on BBC iPlayer this Christmas with the biggest driver of traffic being the Dr Who Christmas special.

12. Hull will be the online shopping capital of Britain of December 2011, with proportionally more people doing their Christmas shopping online than any other city in the UK.

Follow Hitwise on Twitter for more data insights over the Christmas period.

On the heels of a very successful Black Friday, holiday shopping trends continue on an upward trajectory. On Cyber Monday, November 28th, total US visits to the Top 500 Retail websites increased 24% on Cyber Monday as compared to 2010 with more than 170 million US visits. The day before Cyber Monday also showed significant growth over last year with an increase of 14%. Overall, traffic has increased every day over the past week with only one exception, Saturday, Nov. 26th.

Among the categories driving the growth in traffic on Cyber Monday were Department stores (e.g. Amazon and Wal-Mart) Rewards & Directories, Apparel & Accessories, Appliances & Electronics (e.g. Best Buy) and Video & Games (e.g. Game Stop). All the categories saw double-digit growth on Cyber Monday 2011 vs. 2010.

Below is a list of the top visited retail sites on Cyber Monday:

All of the major retail websites experienced double-digit growth on Cyber Monday, including the top 10 sites. In fact, digging further into data shows that 91 of the top 100 sites (or 172 sites out of top 200) retail sites saw year-over-year traffic increases on Cyber Monday 2011 vs. 2010.

Our previous analysis is here for: Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday.

Today we released the twelfth issue of the Experian Hitwise Financial Services Quarterly report, which looks at the top online trends in the finance and insurance markets. It’s amazing to think that the report is three years old, and to highlight some of the insight that the report provides our clients every quarter I’ve dug out some of the findings from the Motor Insurance section.

Motor insurance is by far the biggest type of insurance that is searched for online, and in fact receives more than twice as much search volume as the other major insurances put together. In the week ending 20 August 2011 searches for motor insurance experienced a new peak for the year-to-date; Year-on-year motor insurance searches have grown by 9%.

Looking at the top motor insurance search terms for the 12 weeks ending 1 October 2011 there is an interesting mix of both branded and generic searches in this industry. The top term of the quarter was ‘car insurance’, although this was not as popular as it was in the June quarter. Branded searches for comparisons sites like ‘go compare car insurance’ and ‘confused car insurance’ were up this quarter, which has driven a lot of the growth over the course of the quarter.

The downstream websites shows just how dominant the aggregators are in this market. The top four recipients of traffic from motor insurance searches were all aggregators this quarter, and Aviva UK fell from fourth position last quarter to fifth this quarter.

Aggregators continue to play are very strong role in the key financial products, but are more influential in some industries than others. The below bar chart shows the percentage of visits going to aggregator websites in the top finance products searched for online.

You can see here that aggregators are very dominant in ISA searches, accounting for 2 in every 5 visits from an ISA search. Mortgages, Loans and Savings send double digit percentages of clicks to aggregators, it is only credit card searches that aggregators perform weakly on.

You can find out more about finance online by downloading our free preview which is available from our website. Issue 3 of the Automotive report is also available to download which contains more information on motor insurance and the Automotive Industry as a whole. You can also follow us on Twitter.

Total US visits to the top 500 Retail websites increased 2% on Black Friday as compared to 2010 and received more than 173 million US visits. Traffic has increased each day leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday and the total visits dipped slightly (-1%) on Black Friday compared Thanksgiving Day 2011. Early Black Friday sales resulted in a shift of online traffic, which climbed prior to the Thanksgiving holiday, however, continued heavy promotional activity helped to drive significant online traffic on both Thanksgiving and Black Friday. While Black Friday has been the top day for online retail traffic over the past two years, warm weather and early store openings encouraged shoppers to go online sooner this season.

Among the categories driving the growth in traffic on Black Friday were Department Stores (e.g. Amazon and Wal-Mart) Apparel & Accessories, Appliances & Electronics (e.g. Best Buy) and Video & Games (e.g. Game Stop).

Below is a list of the top visited retail sites on Black Friday:

Many of the major retail websites experienced growth on Black Friday, including Amazon, Best Buy, JC Penney, Sears and Kohl’s. Amazon.com was the most visited website on Black Friday for the 7th year in a row.

Total US visits to the top 500 Retail websites increased 9% on Thanksgiving as compared to 2010 and received more than 176 million US visits. Traffic increased each day leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday and the total visits jumped 57% on Thanksgiving Day from the previous day, Nov. 23, 2011.

Among the categories driving the growth in traffic on Thanksgiving Day were Department stores (e.g. Amazon and Wal-Mart) and Appliances & Electronics (e.g. Best Buy) and Video & Games (e.g. Game Stop).

Below is a list of the top visited retail sites on Thanksgiving Day:

Many of the major retail websites experienced growth on Thanksgiving Day, including Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best Buy, and Kohl’s. Walmart.com was the most visited website on Thanksgiving for the 7th year in a row.

Our Black Friday data will be out later today, the top day for retail traffic for the past two years. We’ll see if the offline madness also translated to online visits.

We’re quite excited here in the Hitwise office and not just because it’s nearly Christmas. We’re always looking to improve our core product and make the data we supply accessible and easy to understand. We have some really exciting developments in the pipeline which are going to change the look and feel of Hitwise dramatically, but today I wanted to introduce our new Dashboards 2.0 product.

The Dashboards platform is a one-stop shop for insight which can be used to bring together different reports within Hitwise into a single page. Dashboards 2.0 is the next evolution of this product and we’ve included a whole raft of additional functionality allowing users to annotate, edit and share dashboards for the first time.

My colleague Rob Redman, Head of Client Services has put together this YouTube video which highlights the key changes to Dashboards 2.0.

One of the coolest things about Dashboards 2.0 is that you can edit data on the fly and still maintain that holistic view of the data on display. In our Power of Facebook dashboard which we have put together as a template for all current clients we can see lots of data about how influential Facebook is online.

If we focus on the Top Hotel sites receiving traffic from Facebook you can see here that the top five sites for October 2011 were TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Travelodge, LateRooms.com and Time Out.

However, if we decided to have a look at another part of the travel industry we could easily edit the dashboard and select Travel> Cruises for example.

This makes Dashboards 2.0 a lot more flexible than it was before, and the ability to share insights with colleagues, affiliates or agency partners means that more people can benefit from the insight of the dashboards you create.

If you want to find out more about Dashboards 2.0 please get in touch. You can also follow Hitwise on Twitter for the latest data trends and future product updates.

Total US online visits to the top 500 retail sites are up 6% last week compared to same time last year. The custom category of 500 retail sites received 607 million total US visits last week and recorded its’ 3rd straight week of growth heading into the Peak Week of online retail traffic. This growth is consistent with what we reported back in October.

We previously noted that the anticipation of Black Friday has been building as Black Friday-related searches were up 17% two weeks ago as compared to the previous year and 154% from the previous week. All of this is good news for retailers as many have been offering their Black Friday deals earlier this week as some shoppers recently told The New York Times that they were tired with waking up early to find stores packed full of people and out-of-stock on the best deals.

Among the categories driving this growth in traffic are Department stores (e.g. Amazon and Wal-Mart) and House & Garden (e.g. Home Depot and Pottery barn).

Below is a list of the top visited retail sites for last week:

It will be interesting to see how this year’s surge of “Christmas Creep” will affect consumer behavior online. Black Friday has been the top visited day among retails sites for the last two years and Thanksgiving Day has traditionally been a heavy online retail day in years past.

As the Occupy movement passed its two month anniversary last week, Occupy-related sites (e.g occupywallstreet.org) experienced a resurgence in market share of visits.

The initial peak in searches for variations of “occupy” and traffic to Occupy-related sites occurred in the first two weeks of October, as web-users sought general information about Occupy protests, the movement’s demands and associated celebrities. The subsequent decline in traffic and searches indicated that general interest in the movement was waning. However, New York’s temporary clearing of Zuccotti Park, and the occasion of the two month anniversary’s “day of action” leading to numerous major events piqued interest in the movement once again.

The psychographic profile of the visitors to the Occupy sites highlights the diversity of those concerned with the movement across economic, geographic and age groups. Using Experian Mosaic Lifestyle segmentation, a household-based consumer lifestyle segmentation system that classifies all U.S. households and neighborhoods into unique segments, we can understand a more robust view of the visitors, including their preferences and habits. “Jet Set Urbanites” accounted for the highest share of visits to the category and the category over-indexes the most in visit share from this Mosaic Type against the online population; this group tends to be highly affluent, progressive and to live in major metropolitan areas. Given the protests which have popped up on college campuses, it’s no surprise to see the category over-indexing in visit share from the “Colleges and Cafes” Mosaic Type. On the other side of the spectrum, the category captured a high share of visits from “Small Town Shallow Pockets” – which skews older, towards those living in exurban small towns and represents one of the least affluent psychographic segments.

The movement’s relevancy to web-users is dependent on major, newsworthy events, rather than an organically sustained interest. But, at these critical junctures, it is worth noting that OWS successfully captures the attention of a broad swath of the US online population, not just a particular segment.

Thanks to Margot Bonner, Analyst on the Custom Data & Insights team for today's analysis.

Thanksgiving is only a few days away and aspiring chefs are hungrily searching online for holiday recipes. Searches for Thanksgiving and turkey recipes traditionally peak the week of Thanksgiving, indicating that recipe searchers procrastinate and wait until the last minute before planning their feast.

Traffic during the 2011 holiday season shows that searches on “Thanksgiving recipes” are primarily driving clicks to FoodNetwork.com, AllRecipes.com, and TasteofHome.com, all of which received a higher share of traffic from the search term as compared with 2010. The websites of CPG companies such as McCormick, Hidden Valley, Betty Crocker, and Kraft Foods have also experienced gains in traffic from searches on ‘thanksgiving recipes’ year over year, most notably from use of paid search.

Despite the fact that search term variation “healthy Thanksgiving recipes” nearly tripled year over year, the general trend shows that there are more variations for “deep fried turkey” and “turducken” (which consists of a chicken stuffed into a duck, which is stuffed into a turkey) , although there were a higher number of these search term variations last year.

Thanks to Lauren Rice, Analyst with the Custom Data & Analysis team, for today's iPhone analysis.

Thanksgiving is only a few days away and aspiring chefs are hungrily searching online for holiday recipes. Searches for Thanksgiving and turkey recipes traditionally peak the week of Thanksgiving, indicating that recipe searchers procrastinate and wait until the last minute before planning their feast. Traffic during the 2011 holiday season shows that searches on “Thanksgiving [...]

This week we released our quarterly Hot Shops List in association with IMRG which saw Apple become the second biggest online retailer in the UK for the first time ever.

Since its inception in 2006 the top of the Hot Shops List has been dominated by Amazon UK and Argos. A number of retailers have fought to win the coveted third place spot in the Hot Shops List including Play.com, Tesco and Next, but Amazon and Argos have never been displaced from the top two spots. Argos dropped to third place this quarter as Apple jumped six places from eighth to second.

UK Internet visits to the Apple website increased five-fold between August and October with Apple accounting for 1 in every 250 visits online in October 2011.

I wrote in October about the sad passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs which not only had an effect on visits to the Apple website but also helped raised awareness of pancreatic cancer, with a seven-fold increase in searches after his death. As well as Jobs’ death, the launch of the new iPhone 4S pushed UK Internet traffic to its highest ever levels for Apple with over 14 million visits in October 2011.

The fast movers of the quarter in the Hot Shops List were ASDA Direct (up 23 places), Very.co.uk (+19), Ticketmaster (+16), H&M (+15) and Toys R Us (+15). Ticketmaster rose to 20th position in the list thanks to announced comeback tours for Steps and the Stone Roses.

You can download the full Hot Shops List from our website. You can also follow Hitwise UK on Twitter for the latest data updates.

This week we released our quarterly Hot Shops List in association with IMRG which saw Apple become the second biggest online retailer in the UK for the first time ever. Since its inception in 2006 the top of the Hot Shops List has been dominated by Amazon UK and Argos. A number of retailers have [...]

Last week Google+ recorded its 3rd largest week in terms of total US visits for the week ending Nov. 12, 2011 receiving more than 6.8 million total US visits. The growth represents a 5% increase versus the previous week and a 25% increase compared to a month ago. The recent growth could possibly be attributed to several new announcements that have come out recently.

The top two weeks for overall visits to Google+ took place when the service opened up to all users the week ending Sept. 24, 2011 and the week directly after. Traffic also increased 3% overall in terms of total US visits and the average visit time increased 15% in October vs. September 2011.

As we noted in a previous post, Google+ benefits from other Google properties for referral traffic. Among the top ten referral sources, eight are Google properties and accounted for 73% off all upstream traffic last week, up from 65% during the peak week of Sept. 24, 2011.

Another positive sign for the site is the share of visits from returning visitors (defined as having visited the website in past 30 days) has been increasing over the last few weeks. The average of the first two weeks of November versus the same time in October shows the share of returning visitors to the Google+ site increased 18%. Last week, 74% of the traffic to Google+ was from returning visitors, suggesting that Google+ users are returning to interact and engage with their networks (aka circles).

Note – the data does not include mobile traffic or traffic from the Google Notification Bar.

Black Friday is almost upon us and the outlook is looking good for a positive start to the holiday season. The NRF predicts that 152 million people will shop over Black Friday weekend, up 10% from last year – a conservative estimate based upon the actual 212 million shoppers that actually appeared in retail stores. Some of this shopping activity may be bolstered by the bevy of retail stores that are opening earlier than any previous holiday seasons despite some pushback from both employees and consumers. Online indicators also point to growing interest with Black Friday-related searches up 17% last week as compared to the previous year and 154% from the previous week.

Traffic to websites dedicated to Black Friday information, such as BlackFriday.info and BFads.net, also increased 15% year-over-year. These websites capture a significant share of Black Friday-related searches; however, there is significant anticipation each year around the release of promotions from specific retailers, whose brand names appear frequently in Black Friday-related searches. Wal-mart is the retailers to appear most frequently, which has also translated into Walmart.com directly capturing a higher share of Black Friday searches. For the 4 weeks ending November 12, 2011, Walmart.com received 10% of Black Friday-related terms, up 9 percentage points from the same time frame last year.

The impact of Wal-mart’s Black Friday sale is also key to driving traffic to the Black Friday websites, where traffic jumped 152% from the previous day when Wal-Mart released information about Black Friday promotions on November 10th. Total visits to Walmart.com also increased 15% on November 10th as compared to the previous day.

Black Friday is almost upon us and the outlook is looking good for a positive start to the holiday season. The NRF predicts that 152 million people will shop over Black Friday weekend, up 10% from last year – a conservative estimate based upon the actual 212 million shoppers that actually appeared in retail stores. [...]