
Page Views on Black Friday and Cyber Monday - jgrahamc
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-truth-about-black-friday-and-cyber-monday/
======
newscracker
_> Despite all of that mobile browsing activity, desktop devices are more
commonly used for checkout actions. People seem to browse more on mobile,
committing to buy more often with desktop..._

Could this be because people are also doing comparison shopping for deals, and
that using tabbed browser interfaces is easier and more convenient on the
desktop than on mobile with smaller screens?

Regardless of the reason, using standalone browsers (as opposed to apps),
especially on desktops, gives users _more_ (this is relative) freedom and
control to avoid being tracked and also block ads and annoyances, resulting in
a much better user experience. That's something I'd always encourage.

P.S.: Off topic, but in the back of my mind I worry about Cloudflare becoming
the new Google, at least as it pertains to collecting information on the sites
that it sits in front of and profiling and monetizing that. Also given that
many sites may use the free SSL solution from Cloudflare, the traffic from
Cloudflare to the site would be visible to it. I wish Cloudflare would provide
cheaper paid plans in multiple tiers so that there's more to it than just free
vs. (a relatively steep) $20 a month.

~~~
dewey
Is $20 really that steep for that? I'd say it's amazingly cheap for what you
get.

~~~
Moru
Yes, but do I need all that or could I live with a small subset of it for
cheaper?

------
pbhjpbhj
>Black Friday is spreading internationally despite these still being normal
working days for the rest of the world. //

My feeling, in the UK, is that it's not stuck. Peak seemed to be 2 years ago,
last year was big but more organised to avoid the violence (!) of the previous
year. This year ... some kids in my city had the day off school, other than
that it seemed calm, some companies definitely avoiding it, perhaps it's moved
primarily online?

A UK consumer rights company "Which?" published price comparison info showing
most items are cheaper at other times of the year. I think this realisation
may in part be why the super-hype is not working.

~~~
corobo
Yeah honestly I completely forgot about it till I went to buy something from
Amazon and saw their banners everywhere (UK). Got a decent enough discount on
the item I wanted but not going to remember it next year either.

------
zylepe
It is deeply concerning that regular employees at cloudflare have access to
analyze the content of user traffic like this.

~~~
danpalmer
Much of this would be semi-public anyway, they could be analysing HTTPS
traffic to find most if not all of these conclusions.

Most of it seems to be domain and user-agent based. I'd suspect you could even
guess the device type based on IP with reasonable accuracy. It wouldn't be
entirely correct, but with the kind of scale Cloudflare deal with it doesn't
have to be to be useful.

The domain (which is public) gives you the info about whether users are
browsing or checking out (if a browser hits api.stripe.com, worldpay, PayPal,
some checkout API domain for Amazon, etc, then you can infer).

~~~
zylepe
The particular part that is concerning:

 _If you imagine a typical ecommerce application makes a purchase with a HTTP
request like “POST /store/checkout HTTP/1.1” we can look for requests similar
to this to understand the activity._

~~~
danpalmer
Yep that is more concerning. They might be using unencrypted HTTP to get an
idea of the breakdown and then inferring volumes based on HTTPS traffic and
known differences between the two.

I basically wouldn't jump to "Cloudflare have a bunch of sensitive data and
will use it in bad ways", I suspect they have less data than we might assume
from the article, and in general their security/privacy stance is great.

------
canthonytucci
>We can see here that Black Friday has an almost 200% increase in checkout
interactions compared to the previous Friday.

Anecdotally I hear a lot of people say they are "waiting for Black Friday".

Is it best to compare to the previous Friday here, or to average Fridays? some
other number?

------
megous
A lot of other stuff might be analyzable from those "POST /store/checkout"
requests, too, so please keep sharing with the world. Thanks! You're awesome!

------
55555
I would love to see this data for Singles' Day (the Chinese holiday).
Alibaba's claims are staggering.

~~~
thisone
Singles day is also migrating around the world now.

There are some numbers from Alibaba that I've seen in Apache Flink
presentations, though I can't remember which ones off the top of my head

------
shaklee3
These plots seem to be very deceiving. Obviously if you aren't one of the big
players like Walmart or Amazon, it may not look as dramatic as it really was.
I'm assuming cloudflare is not a cache for those two?

------
ramshanker
I suspect google could do the same with "Anonymize Data" from FREE Google
analytics platform.

------
mywacaday
Why is the content only taking up a middle third of the available space on a
20" monitor making the text on the graphs almost unreadable? Not even an
option to zoom/click on the graphs.

