Effects Of Protesting On Online Shopping

Although there was some debate about the size of the Women's March on January 21st, what wasn't up for discussion was that when people are protesting en masse, they're not at home shopping online. While that much is obvious, we thought it would be helpful to quantify the effects of protesting on online shopping.

We already know that coupon usage parallels both consumer confidence and online spending, so we took a look at the number of promotions consumed on an ordinary January 21st versus 2017. In short, we found 8% fewer coupons consumed the day of the protest. While an 8% dip on one day isn't going to put most companies out of business, it's worth noting that Saturdays are--by far--the slowest day for shopping online; about 15% lower than Sundays, the second-slowest day.

While the protest was intended as a warning shot at the Trump presidency in a lot of ways, we can see that one of the potential casualties could be business--particularly small business--if similar protests continued or occurred mid-week.

Methodology: Most of our monthly Big Data series comes from the tracking of 10,000 anonymous subscribers of PromotionCode.org but in this case, we used the complete data sets of coupon consumption. This data has been normalized against common disruptions like day-of-week expectations, search engine rankings (higher positions on that day equals more traffic which equals more coupon consumption), etc.