Internet Shopping Times – Predicting Day’s Total Sales

If you’re like me and can’t resist checking how much money you’ve made several times during each day, you might find this useful, especially if you are keen to see how a new element in your website is affecting sales. When I look at how many sales I’ve had so far in the current day, I often want to compare it with how I’ve performed in previous days. The problem is at 3 in the afternoon, you won’t have a full set of results to compare with the previous 24 hours.

Using a sample of over 35,000 searches on ebay during a 24 hour period then multiplying it by the conversion rate and calculating an accumulated total, I produced this chart. It shows what percent of your total sales for the day you will have likely produced by any particular time. For example, if you have made £100 by 3pm, that is roughly 31% of your day’s sales, so by the end of the day you can expect to make around £300. You can see that roughly half of your sales will have been made by 6pm. Obviously this method will sometimes give you estimates which are way out, but it is probably the easiest way to get a reasonable estimate.

Time	% of day’s sales to time
1	2.2
2	3.4
3	4.1
4	4.5
5	4.8
6	5.3
7	5.7
8	6.3
9	7.4
10	9.6
11	12.8
12	17.1
13	21.6
14	26.1
15	31.5
16	37.3
17	43.9
18	50.0
19	57.5
20	67.7
21	78.3
22	88.1
23	95.6
24	100.0

This ebay data was gathered using TeraPeak*.