E-Tailers’ Prime Time Is During Office Hours
For television networks, prime time commences after dinner. For e-tailers, it starts after workers come into the office and fire up their computers.
This holiday season in particular, many commerce Web sites are reporting traffic spikes between noon and 5 p.m., prompting analysts to dub this window the “New Prime Time.”
“If you talk to any e-tailer, they will tell you that their peak traffic goes from late morning to late afternoon,” said Marissa Gluck, an analyst with Jupiter Research in New York. “That tells us right there that consumers are shopping at work.”
Between drafting budgets and pumping out memos, employees also are increasingly sneaking in online shopping trips for everything from groceries to T-shirts.
More than 43 million workers access the Internet at work, according to Jupiter Research. That figure is expected to surge 46%, to 63 million, by 2005. This holiday season, an estimated 24 million workers will shop online, according to WebSense Inc., a San Diego company that makes software used by companies to monitor their employees’ Internet activities.
For e-tailers, this represents unprecedented access to a desirable segment of affluent, techno-savvy consumers who have always-on, high-speed Internet access. For employers, online shopping at work can clog up company computers and distract employees from work, leading some companies to develop policies limiting use of the Internet for personal business. Judging by the numbers, however, such policies haven’t completely stamped out the practice.
Many Web sites, including Borders.com, RedEnvelope.com, Ashford.com and Gap.com, are reporting more traffic from work shoppers than home shoppers. KBkids.com, the Denver-based online arm of K-B Toys Inc., got 61% of its traffic from work surfers, compared with 39% from home surfers, for the week ended Dec. 3, according to NetRatings.
“Surfing for holiday presents has become the equivalent of the water cooler break for many office workers,” said Sean Kaldor, vice president of e-commerce at NetRatings Inc., a Milpitas, Calif., company that tracks Web-site traffic.
To be sure, people long have been taking care of personal needs while at work. But before the Internet, retailers had few opportunities to peddle their products and messages to these workers. The Internet, and the fact that many employers are not only tolerating shopping at work but in some cases encouraging it, has opened a new vein for merchants to mine.
“Companies are asking their employees to work longer hours and on weekends,” said Jeremy Singer, a vice president with Abilizer.com, a San Francisco firm that sets up corporate Web sites for employees. “Any tools they can give to employees to manage their lives is seen as beneficial.”
Cell-phone giant Ericsson, for example, has an online shopping channel on its internal Web site.
“It’s really no different than me going to the mall for an hour during lunch,” said Shelly Weber, Ericsson’s manager of work-life programs. “We want our employees to balance their work life with their personal life.”
Abilizer operates corporate Web sites, which large companies use to communicate with employees. Among the features on these sites are online shops, including Gap.com, WebVan.com, EToys.com and Disney.com. Abilizer has found that, on average, employees visit these sites about once a week, hitting six online merchants per visit.
“It keeps employees at their desks,” said Gluck of Jupiter Research. “They don’t have to take a two-hour lunch to go out and shop.”
For John Nelson, an engineer with Zelerate in San Mateo, a two-hour lunch is unheard of. So he turns to the Internet to get his shopping done.
“I work Silicon Valley hours, and I don’t get out much to shop,” said Nelson, who worked past midnight on a recent Saturday evening. “So I sit down to make my purchases around noon and my dinner break.”
Nelson’s employer doesn’t seem to mind.
“At the end of the day, as long as we meet our targets, we don’t see this as a problem,” said Paul Carlstrom, a Zelerate spokesman.
Not everyone has Zelerate’s liberal outlook.
A survey of 670 employers found that 15% of respondents believe that no time should be spent surfing nonwork-related sites; 35% said between 10 minutes and 30 minutes would be acceptable. The survey, by market research firm Vault.com, also found that 42% of employers actively monitor their workers’ Internet activity. That’s up from 31% last year.
The increase in online shopping at work “equals an enormous loss in productivity and a strain on company resources,” said Philip Hill, a spokesman at WebSense. “Someone will go online thinking they will buy one present, and the next thing they know, they’ve been online for a couple of hours and have bought all their gifts.”
It’s that kind of situation that companies such as Computer Sciences Corp. want to avoid.
“We’re not the Grinch,” said CSC spokesman Michael Dickerson. But “we do have a communications policy that pretty much precludes personal use of the Internet at work. It goes beyond a productivity issue. It’s also a bandwidth issue. Certainly, if everyone suddenly jumps online to shop, it could create a bandwidth issue.”
But CSC and others don’t want to come down too hard.
“You have to choose your battles,” said Kevin Rosenberg, managing director and partner of BridgeGate, an Irvine executive search firm. “For me to sit around and monitor individual shopping habits is not a good use of my time, and it doesn’t necessarily cast me in a good light. I’m realistic. The best thing we can do is treat people like adults and expect reciprocal behavior.”
It might reassure employers to know that research shows most workers who shop online are more task-oriented, while home surfers tend to be more leisurely.
“At home, people will surf more casually,” said Kaldor of NetRatings. “It’s a much more focused initiative at work. People are squeezing this in between things.”
To lure the at-work shopper, e-tailers must make their sites less time-consuming to navigate, Gluck said. Amazon’s 1-Click ordering and Microsoft’s Passport, which automatically fill in shipping and billing information, are useful for time-starved workers. “More importantly, they obviate the need for consumers to pull a credit card out of their wallet at work, a clear indicator of personal activity in the office,” Gluck noted.
For workers who want help covering their tracks, Terra Lycos Inc. of Waltham, Mass., offers a cosmetic remedy. The company has put a “Panic Button” on its shopping site that, when clicked, will cover the shopping window with an official-looking screen.
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Shopping at Home vs. Work
Many e-tailers get the majority of their sales from shoppers who are online at work. A look at the traffic mix at top Internet sites.
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For week ended Dec. 3
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Source: Nielsen/NetRatings
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Online Onslaught
Online shopping in the workplace is on the rise, providing greater convenience for workers but causing headaaches for employers. The number of people who use the internet at work is expected to surge 46% in the next five years. Estimated total number of users, in millions:
2005: 63 million.
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Source: Jupiter Research
