Illinois holiday shopping by the numbers (Chicago Business Journal)

The holiday shopping season is about to swing into high gear in Illinois.

Womply, a small business-focused software firm, has crunched the Illinois-centric holiday shopping data for local independent retailers so both retailers and consumers will know what to expect in the days and weeks to come.

To come up with the data Womply constantly analyzed transactions at 54,000 local independent retailers in all 50 states throughout 2017.

First off, Illinois is not a Top 10 state when it comes to revenue generated from holiday shopping. Womply ranks Illinois 15th in the nation in terms of average daily revenue generated during the holiday shopping season, with local retailers realizing on average $1,803 in sales per day.

In Illinois, Black Friday, however, just happens to be the best shopping day of the year, with local retailers typically seeing a 97 percent increase in sales over the average day for the rest of the year.

Then there’s Small Business Saturday, which doesn’t get the same love from consumers in Illinois that Black Friday does. Per Womply, Small Business Saturday is the 40th best revenue day of the year, with a 24 percent boost in sales over the average day of the year.

Cyber Monday, however, does surprisingly well for local retailers that Womply tracks. In Illinois, Cyber Monday is the 66th best shopping day of the year (in the top 20 percent of all shopping days in other words).

Womply data specialists found that to be an interesting and surprisingly strong statistic because most of the retailers it tracks are single-location, brick-and-mortar shops with little-to-no online presence.

So these retailers in Illinois have found ways, it appears, to move merchandise online despite the fact online sales are not a major focus for them.