Storm Juno Came at a $35M Price for Online Retailers

Online retailers don’t even have brick-and-mortar stores, but Storm Juno still managed to blow their doors off.

The winter storm that overtook a large part of New England last Tuesday (Jan. 27) cost online retailers $35 million due to power outages, overrun cellular networks and general preparation for the snowfall, Adobe estimates. Five billion visits to 400 large U.S. online retailers were analyzed in assessing the losses.

Online Web searches commonly decline during major storms, and lower temperatures lead to lower online sales, as weather conditions can affect them by 10 percent to 15 percent (with snow serving as the greatest factor in reducing sales). This amounted to online sales growth falling to half of expected sales (5 percent compared to the average of 10 percent over the previous 10 days) during the first half of Tuesday.

Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst for the Adobe Digital Index, attributed the overall drop in sales to offices throughout the Northeast being closed. To put it into perspective, that $35 million total would account for about 4.5 percent of all e-commerce sales in the country in an average day.

“During the work week, a lot of people really do shop from their work desktop,” Gaffney said. “You also have power outages and people out shoveling snow. They’re not shopping, they’re doing other things. It has a negative impact on e-commerce.”

While Storm Juno didn’t quite turn out to be the record-breaking blizzard that forecasters had predicted, it was severe enough to put a serious crimp in the shipping operations of major carriers in the Northeast, with UPS, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service all reporting service delays and shutdowns Jan. 27-28.

While New York City was also affected by the storm on Tuesday, online sales in the region remained normal.