What Time Do People Shop Online?
A recent study on when people shop online shows Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays as the biggest online shopping days of the week.
To dive deeper into these online shopping statistics, we need to answer the question: What time do people shop online?
What time do people shop online: peak online shopping hours
According to a survey on peak online shopping hours, the period around lunchtime experiences the highest online shopping activity of the day.
The study, which measures shopping activity using an index and allocates 100 as the average, shows that consumers are most actively shopping online at 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. These two hours register indexes of 151 and 149, respectively, making them the peak online shopping hours of the day.
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This finding is in line with several other surveys on work time shopping. One indicates that as many as 46% of people shop online during their breaks and lunchtime, and results from another show that more than half (51%) say their online shopping activity during working hours has increased since the pandemic.
The next highest online shopping activity comes in the few hours just before and after lunchtime—3 p.m. has an index of 145, while both 12 p.m. and 4 p.m. have indexes of 142.
Peak online shopping hours in the evening and at night
Shopping activity decreases slightly from that moment on and eventually hits 132 at 8 p.m., before rising again as night falls. 9 p.m. sees an online shopping index of 134, the peak online shopping hour at night. This falls slightly to 133 at 10 p.m.
At 11 p.m., online shopping activity remains relatively high, with an index of 123. But this falls considerably immediately after. The survey results of peak online shopping hours show that at 12 a.m., the index dips to 104.
The fall in online shopping activity continues through the early hours of the day, before reaching its lowest point at 5 a.m., with an index of 22. The low activity during this period should come as no surprise, as it’s when most people are asleep.
Online shopping activity starts rising again from 6 a.m. onwards, increasing hour after hour until its peak at 1 p.m. The biggest hour-to-hour jump in the index comes between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., when the index surges 28 points, from 75 to 103.