Black Friday and Cyber Monday Live Map | Hacker News Reader

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Live Map

datastories.shopify.com

121 pointsAnd115 comments

We've had a live sales map for every Black Friday over the last 10 years. Somewhat refined it every year with the web becoming better and better.

The first ones were a bunch of divs over a png of the world, then canvas with SVG arcs, now webgl. It's a ridiculously busy time at Shopify each year and an event we take very seriously to get right.

It's a tradition for me as well to stare at it and fiddle with it for a while. Coming from ecommerce, the scale staggers me! This and what Alibaba does on singles day. Kudos.

> Normal users

Yay it's Black Friday / Cyber Monday! lets keep shopping!

> HN Crowd

Oooh another lava lamp, look at all those live payments! That's cool!

> Tinfoilers

Is it me or is it scary that Shopify can see my live payments in real time?

> Me

Meh. It's a Friday, I'm going to party tonight.

We went to my sister's house for Thanksgiving, so we spent Black Friday driving back home and then playing games together when we got home. We went out the next day and got a few things (needed and snow gear), but mostly avoided shopping.

It's way more relaxing to not bother with going shopping. There are plenty of good deals throughout the rest of the year, so why fight traffic and crowds to shop on one specific weekend?

I'm in for partying

Open the dev console for some fun... debugShopify()

Can you please give us more details or write a post on how you do this. Very cool!

Not the same thing of course, but this reminded me of the video of the Chinese sorting center after the 2018 11.11 (Singles' Day) sale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjdpz05u2DY

Singles Day is the worlds busiest shopping day.

China seems way too quiet. There's ~8k orders per minute, and only ~200 per minute (~2.5%) come from China?

I feel like it is likely the "corporate" end is the HQ in America. But then we're using these lines to calculate shipping distances.

Or, IDK, maybe everything is already in a warehouse on the mainland.

AFAIK China doesn't do much black Friday stuff. Iirc they have singles day which just crushes BF in sales

https://america.cgtn.com/2019/11/29/black-friday-how-us-reta...

Black Friday is useless, at least in my country. Half shops jack up priced a few weeks before and then "discounted" to original level, another half just set small sales on garbage tier devices at 5-10% level. It's like with advertisements - I suppose some of them may be genuine, but I don't bother to find out in a sea of scam and lies.

As someone who spent a bit too much time on designing and developing live Pi powered dashboards for his home office I can truly appreciate a visualization like this.

I would characterize US's 2019 black Friday as:

- 50% off things should not buy

- 10-15% off things you cannot afford.

Ali's 11/11 in 2019 seemed to be more affordable.

This is quite an achievement in realtime viz. /r/dataisbeautiful would be proud.

I think Ali also has one for 11/11? Maybe I am mistaken...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com