I came across an interesting mystery today.

You would think that traffic to retailers would remain high throughout Christmas. Let’s face it, a lot of people haven’t bought a single gift yet, and haven’t even THOUGHT about what gifts they’re going to buy yet.  Let’s also face the fact that procrastination is a growing trend in our society.

You would think…

Yes, you would think that traffic to retailers remains high throughout December. However, that is not the case. What we actually see is a very sharp drop in traffic to all major retailers. In order, here is the traffic graph for Amazon, Wal Mart, and Target:

Amazon:

So my first thought was OK, everyone who was going to use Amazon for their X-Mas shopping was a member of the “I’m too good to go to a store, and by the way I’m not lazy, I’m going to get all my shopping out of the way right now online” group. I thought perhaps it was a trend of internet shopping, a relation between people being proactive about their shopping and a behavior pattern for using the internet.

Boy was I wrong. When I dug deeper, I found that traffic to retail sites was also down:

Wal Mart and Target:

So, now I thought “This is strange, why is their traffic down. Certainly people are logging on to their websites to see what sales there are, and going to them. And certainly these people still have plenty of shopping left to do”.

Something wasn’t adding up.

If online retailer traffic was down, brick-and-mortar retailer traffic should be up. The answer, however, was that it was. I was right all along.

Wal Mart and Target are online retailers!

Then it hit me. “Wait a second, Wal Mart and Target ARE online retailers!” See, all the things I can buy in their store, I can buy online at their sites:

So what’s really going on?

I assumed that Wal Mart and Target were brick and mortar businesses, primarily, and that their website traffic would be for people looking to key in on deals available in-store. However, what I found out was that Walmart.com and Target.com are online retailers primarily, and so their traffic drops just like amazons, just like buy.com, and just like all the other internet retailers.

Take home message:

People doing their shopping online are like Ninjas. They wait until exactly the day after thanksgiving. Their shopping is quick, without mercy, and instantaneous. And then they rest. The peak to online retailers does NOT continue through December, so if you just got your affiliate store up and running, sorry, you’re out of luck.

However, if we could measure traffic to brick-and-mortar stores, I bet as the traffic to internet retailers subsides, parking lots start to fill up.