Jay Henderson, Strategy Director, IBM Smarter Commerce

IBM Digital Benchmark Offers Real-Time Insight on Online Shopping Trends
Kicking off Thanksgiving Day and extending through Cyber Monday, IBM will provide the latest online, mobile and social sales trends as they happen
Guest: Jay Henderson, Strategy Director, IBM Smarter Commerce
Background:
While consumers are making their holiday gift lists for friends and family, retailers will be hustling to get in-store and online sites ready for the big holiday rush. Their challenge? It’s not a matter of when or what consumers will buy, but how they will buy. Will mobile shoppers continue to take the lead? Will they shop via web, smartphone or tablet? Will they expand their use of social channels? And is this the year that Thanksgiving overtakes Black Friday as the official kick-off to the holiday shopping season?
These are the questions IBM will help answer in real-time through the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, which analyzes online shopping data ahead of Thanksgiving Day through Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and into the holiday season. The IBM Benchmark is a cloud-based digital analytics platform that tracks millions of e-commerce transactions a day, analyzing terabytes of raw data from approximately 800 participating U.S. retail web sites. The Benchmark is the only cloud-based, real-time resource for retailers and marketers that need to uncover shopping trends across a variety of channels including social media, mobile devices, and other online sources where consumers interact with their brands.
The Benchmark analyzes the following metrics:
– Overall online sales — including overall sales for an given moment as well as average order value, items per order and the time shopping peaked
– Overall sales for vertical industries — including department stores, apparel, and home goods
– Mobile traffic — including overall mobile commerce sales, traffic by device, tablet traffic by device, and phone vs. tablet statistics
– Social traffic –including information on online sales generated by shoppers referred from Social Networks, i.e. Facebook vs. Pinterest
– Savviest Cities for Online Shoppers — including the top cities for online sales per capita
The Benchmark consists of more than 800 participating U.S. retail websites, including 50 percent of the Internet Retailer Top 100 and 20 percent of the Internet Retailer 500. All brand data is anonymous. In 2012, the Benchmark garnered more than 15,000 media hits alone, with key outlets like the Associated Press,Reuters, New York Times, CNN, Forbes, Fox Business, USA Today, and more reporting on the data.