We're off to the big shopping spree on Monday - to the online stores

On Mondays, online stores earn twice as much as on Saturdays, according to data from online shopping platform Shoper, as well as online payment operator Blue Media. On the first day of the week, many more visits also end in purchases than on weekends.

After the ban on trading on Sundays, shopping was supposed to move online, where sales are allowed 24/7. This has partly happened - e-shops have reported Sunday sales increases. However, they are largely part of the general trend in the e-commerce industry. Indeed, a report from the Interaktywnie portal shows that the value of online commerce is growing in Poland at a rate of more than 20 percent a year.

The Retail Institute, based on observations and analysis, indicated in 2017 that Poles were most likely to visit shopping malls on Saturdays and Sundays. In turn, a survey by IQS, conducted already after the trade restrictions introduced last March, suggested that consumer interest had shifted to Fridays. The analysis by Shopera experts shows that the closed supermarkets, however, did not change online habits and shift e-commerce fever to the weekend. Saturday and Sunday in 2018 were the least popular shopping days of the week on the platform.

- Intuition tells us that since there are thousands of offers to compare online, and it can take a long time to look through them, so the ideal time for e-shopping would be the weekend. Data shows that the opposite is true. In 2018, store traffic on our platform was 13 percent lower on weekend days than the average from Monday to Friday, says Lukasz Kozlowski of Shopera, "On Saturdays and Sundays, traffic translates poorly into actual purchases. The daily number of transactions on weekends was 30 percent lower last year, and store revenues were as much as 43 percent lower than on weekdays. Weaker-than-average sales also apply to holidays falling in the middle of the week, Shopera's expert notes.

Blue Media's data from the last quarter of 2018, based on the number and value of purchase transactions made using Blue Media Online Payments, basically confirms Shopper's results. In terms of turnover, Monday is more than twice as strong as Saturday or Sunday. That's 20 percent of turnover to 7 percent on Saturday and 8 percent on Sunday, respectively.

- Interestingly, the value of transactions was low on Sundays, but when we look at the number of transactions - it may surprise us that there are the most transactions on this day compared to other days of the week. On Sundays falling in the last quarter of 2018, consumers finalized 18 percent of their purchases, but they were also evidently very small, since they accounted for only 9 percent of the sales value for the entire week. Monday was comparable in terms of the number of purchases made and at the same time leads due to the value of purchases. Monday should be the favorite day for e-tailers," says Marcin Szczur of Blue Media.

Peak on Monday, bottom on Saturday

Shopper's data shows that we are most active on e-commerce in the first days of a new week, especially on Monday. Traffic on store websites on that day was 8 percent higher than the weekly average in 2018.

- Every retailer should perform a similar analysis for their store. For specific industries, Monday's highs and weekend lows may turn out to be a bit more flattened, or the opposite. If the data coincides with the general trend in the e-commerce market, it's a good idea to ride the wave and take advantage of the increased shopping interest at the beginning of the week. You can offer a small discount or gift on Mondays to drive the sales peak even higher with small incentives, suggests Lukasz Kozlowski of Shopera.

Monday is also the day when the most e-commerce visits end in a completed purchase - 1 in 54. On Saturdays, it's only 1 in 80. The number of Monday transactions last year in Shopera's online stores exceeded the weekly average by 22 percent and was almost double the average Saturday result.

The statistics for online shopping spending look similar. In the second half of 2018, typical Monday in-store spending on the Shoper platform exceeded the amount of Saturday spending by as much as 133 percent and the weekly average by 29 percent.