Christmas Eve sets new record

Christmas Eve sets new record
Auckland, 24 December 2016

The busiest 15 seconds in retail shopping in New Zealand came early this year with the peak arriving at 11:45am rather than falling in the traditional 1230 to 1pm period.

Last year Christmas Eve peaked at 157 transactions per second. This year that figure was eclipsed with 171 transactions per second being recorded.

However this Christmas Eve won’t be the biggest shopping day of the year with that honour falling to Friday, December 23rd.

Traditionally Christmas Eve is the busiest day, except in years when it falls on the weekend when Friday tends to set records. The last time Christmas Eve fell on a Saturday was 2011 and it too followed the same pattern with the busiest shopping day arriving a day early.

The 12-1pm hour today accounted for more than half a million transactions (543,538 in total) making it the busiest hour of the day.

Paymark has seen three days in a row of transactions exceeding the five million mark (21-23 December), another first for the company. While the final figures for 24 December are yet to counted it looks likely to end with more than five million transactions as well.

The switch has held up well with no reports of problems on the network, which accounts for more than 75% of the nation’s EFTPOS terminals.

The technology team at Paymark ensures the network is as resilient as possible to minimise downtime for retailers at this key time of the year. Even with record peaks such as the ones seen today, the network is still operating well below its maximum capacity.

Peak hour with 543,538 transactions – 12 noon.
Peak minute with 9,389 transactions at minute 12:20pm
Peak second with 171 transactions at 11:45:45.

ENDS

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