The Effects of the Financial Meltdown Online Habits

Nielsen’s latest newsletter covered how people reacted to October’s financial flubs on Wall Street. The statistics pulled in the reports were a little different than I would have expected, so I thought I would share some of them:

1.  Online Travel is still going strong. Nielsen reports that travel transactions make up 38% (the majority) in October.

 *The impending holidays definitely helped with this number, but I would have thought rising prices and shrinking expendable incomes might have put a damper on holiday travel…guess not!

2. Web traffic to financial sites increased (not surprising) but time spent per unique visitor decreased.

 *An expanation for this could be that users did not want to get their information from one destination, so they hopped around and didn’t stay in one place for too long–still a little unexpected.

3. Nearly 80 percent of online users made an online purchase within the last 6 months.

*6 months is a long time, but the recession has been on the horizon for a while. I would be interested to see how this compares to offline sales. Is it possible that shopping in the face of an economic downturn or were they just diverting their shopping habits online?

Black Friday 2009 will be an important indicator for how consumers are truly reacting to the current economic climate? Any predictions? What are we in for this holiday season?