Black Friday is largely considered to be the biggest shopping day of the year in the US, but the location discovery app Foursquare has discovered that another day accounted for the most foot traffic to physical stores in 2014.
The lesser-known shopping day is called "Super Saturday," or the Saturday before Christmas.
Foursquare's main app and standalone location check-in app Swarm is used by millions of people around the world, and the company tapped into that data to discover the rising popularity of Super Saturday, which overthrew Black Friday in 2014 as the busiest shopping day of the year.
"In terms of visits to physical (brick-and-mortar) stores, people last year were no longer frontloading shopping as much as before," Foursquare COO Jeff Glueck said in a blog post. "Consumers were more backloading, increasing last-minute shopping in the week leading up to Christmas."
Some other revelations the company found about holiday shopping behavior:
- "On Black Friday, electronics stores see the biggest surge in traffic."
- "The biggest winners on the weekend before Christmas are toy and gaming stores."
- "The category that gets the most uneven traffic is home improvement stores."
- "Specialty stores fare better in the beginning of the season, whereas department stores and big box stores attract more visitors later in the holiday season."
Black Friday versus Super Saturday isn't the only way Foursquare has recently used its data in interesting ways.
By aggregating the foot traffic of people with the Foursquare or Swarm app installed, the company accurately predicted how many new iPhones Apple would sell during the smartphone's opening weekend of sales in September. It also analyzed the success of McDonald's vs. Taco Bell's breakfast menu. More recently, the main Foursquare app added a crowd sourced list of trending new restaurants in major cities based on foot traffic data.
Foursquare plans to share updated results next week about the popularity of Black Friday and whether the trend has swung back towards shoppers going out earlier in the holiday season.
