Online shopping a headache for bosses

Many workers are doing their online Christmas shopping from the office, research suggests, prompting companies to hit back.

Research shows peak online spending is between 11am and 5pm — when many people are at work. Pic: iStock.

Your boss calling you to discuss the latest budget, emails from customers confirming contract prices, or yet another staff meeting to discuss the HR department’s latest changes to the performance review process.

All these, and more, are getting in the way of online shopping. Or are they?

In the lead up to Christmas, many workers around Australia appear to be letting phones ring off the hook and making shopping their priority as they log on to online shopping sites and surf the net for the best deals, in a growing trend nicknamed “desktop shopping”.

And it is increasingly threatening worker productivity, as some offices even restrict or ban staff access to shopping sites.

Workers are also being banned from having parcels delivered to work, as company mail rooms struggle to cope with flood of personal deliveries.

New research from Commonwealth Bank indicates Australian consumers are shopping online more than ever in the lead up to Christmas, but especially during working hours.

The CBA research, based on the tens of millions of credit card transactions executed over its systems for the last few weeks, shows peak spending is being seen between 11am and 5pm.

This means an ever-increasing proportion of Australians are shopping from their work computers, using company bandwidth, memory and power as they jump on that hot new deal on eBay.

“These findings come as more Australians stick to their screens to purchase Christmas gifts for loved ones, with the growth in online retail spend up 20 per cent on the previous year compared with in-store spending, which grew only two per cent,’’ CBA said today.

“We’ve seen a rise in ‘desktop shopping’ this year,” said CBA managing director, retail, Nick Aronson.

“Shopping trends such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Click Frenzy, and the launch of large online retailers like Amazon, have driven value-conscious consumers online to search for the best price,” he said.

“The marked increase in online spending this year reflects the influence of these global and national shopping trends on customer behaviour, and we expect this only to grow.

“The increase in online sales on these four key dates indicate that the launch of Amazon has the potential to influence customer behaviour and reshape the way Australian retailers conduct business,” Mr Aronson says.

But the popularity of online shopping is having a deleterious impact on worker productivity.

Recent surveys in the US showed that more than half of workers admitted to “downing tools” at work as they were distracted by online shopping.

One survey revealed two in five people (42 per cent) confessed to clocking off to shop online for Christmas presents.

In the US, a survey by recruitment firm Robert Half reported that 23 per cent of employees planned to spend more time shopping online while at work the Monday after Thanksgiving than they had previously.

In the UK the huge volumes of parcels being delivered to work mailrooms has reportedly led to bans on personal deliveries by large employers such as HSBC, JP Morgan and Citi.

Meanwhile, the CBA report also said that consumers are spending more on eating out, up 15 per cent on last year’s figures for the same period, and that in particular CBA credit card holders have spent 24 per cent more on fast food and 12 per cent more at restaurants. The purchase of cinema tickets is also up 10 per cent this Christmas.

“The holiday season is notoriously busy for everyone. The increase in online spending, and shift in spending on ‘experiences’, reflect a trend of consumers placing higher value on the quality of their time,” Mr Aronson said.