If William Shatner is ready for a new gig away from travel deals, Scot Wingo of ChannelAdvisor may have discovered what that starring role should be.

The Online Shopping Procrastinator.

Beam me up, Scotty!

So what’s this procrastinator business?

Wingo, the founder and chief executive officer at global ecommerce services provider that’s based in Morrisville, says a new trend emerged in what was a bit of a sluggish online shopping season.

He calls it the “Procrastinator Pop” – shoppers waiting until the last minute to shop for the best deals and then counting on retailers to get goods delivered in time for Christmas.

In Wingo’s view, he sees the trend as as a sign of growing confidence in the ecommerce community.

“While we don’t report on category data, when we piece together our same store sales reports through the holiday, we see an interesting U shape that had three parts,” Wingo tells The Skinny.

  • “Early surge driven by Thanksgiving-CyberMonday (what we call the Cyberfive) promos and early-shopping consumers.
  • “A mid-december lull – from around Dec 7 – 18 it was unusually quiet this year.
  • “Procrastinator pop – from Dec 19-22 we saw an interesting pop in orders that we haven’t seen as pronounced in past years.”

Wingo graphs sales data almost to infinity to track what’s happening in the online world.

“When you put those three together, you get an interesting U shape,” he explains. “I think the procrastinator pop shows that people really trust ecommerce shipments/delivery more than they ever have in the past – as narrow as 1-2 days.

“Past holidays had more of a down to the right type shape, so this year the dip was new and the procrastinator pop at the end were new trends.”