What’s the biggest day of the holiday season for holiday shopping? Black Friday, the day after US Thanksgiving, has been embraced globally as the day retail stores announce their sales. But it was believed that the following Monday, dubbed “Cyber Monday,” may be even bigger. Or, with the explosion of reliable 2-day and even 1-day shipping, maybe another day closer to Christmas has taken the crown. At Cloudflare, we aimed to answer this question for the 2019 holiday shopping season.

Black Friday was the biggest online shopping day but the second biggest wasn't Cyber Monday... it was Thanksgiving Day itself (the day before Black Friday!). Cyber Monday was the fourth biggest day.

Here's a look at checkout events seen across Cloudflare's network since before Thanksgiving in the US.

Checkout events as a percentage of checkouts on Black Friday

The weekends are shown in yellow and Black Friday and Cyber Monday are shown in green. You can see that checkouts ramped up during Thanksgiving week and then continued through the weekend into Cyber Monday.

Black Friday had twice the number of checkouts as the preceding Friday and the entire Thanksgiving week dominates. Post-Cyber Monday, no day reached 50% of the number of checkouts we saw on Black Friday. And Cyber Monday was just 60% of Black Friday.

So, Black Friday is the peak day but Thanksgiving Day is the runner up. Perhaps it deserves its own moniker: Thrifty Thursday anyone?

Checkouts occur more frequently from Monday to Friday and then drop off over the weekend. After Cyber Monday only one other day showed an interesting peak. Looking at last week it does appear that Tuesday, December 17 was the pre-Christmas peak for online checkouts. Perhaps fast online shipping made consumers feel they could use online shopping as long as they got their purchases by the weekend before Christmas.

Happy Holidays from everyone at Cloudflare!