It’s Cyber Monday!! According to USA Today, citing Adobe Analytics data, Cyber Monday sales in the U.S. are expected to reach $6.6 billion this year, an increase of 16.5% from 2016.
Online shopping is growing at such a rate in recent years that about every shopping day may one day be “cyber day”. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, seasonally-adjusted online purchases country-wide in the 3rd quarter of 2017 totaled $115.3 billion, accounting for 9.1% of the total retail sales during that same period. To put this in perspective, only 3.5% of seasonally-adjusted retail sales were made online in the first quarter of 2008. For a more recent comparison, seasonally-adjusted online sales in the 3rd quarter of 2017 are up by 15.5% over the same quarter in 2016, whereas total retail sales only increased by 4.3%.
While online purchases are undoubtedly becoming more and more common for American shoppers, not everyone is on board. The map below, created using ESRI’s model-based online purchasing estimates for 2017, offers a picture of the Atlanta Metro region in which online shopping varies considerably based on the location and demographic characteristics of where people live. For example, nearly half of the people in the North Fulton superdistrict (made up of a group of census tracts) are estimated to have purchased something online in a given month. In South Fulton and DeKalb Counties, Clayton County, and in much of the outer exurban counties like Walton, Carroll, and Bartow, the percent of people who shop online in any given month is estimated at 35% or less.
*Estimate of people who made a personal purchase online in the last 30 days, using national propensities to use various products and services applied to local demographic conditions. Usage data were collected by GfK MRI in a nationally representative survey of U.S. household.