Today In Data: Spontaneous Commerce, Shared Housing And Smart Decanters

The holidays are always filled with product releases (just in time for holiday shopping), plenty of innovations, a few bizarre products and end-of-year evaluations on company processes.

Today in PYMNTS’ data, spontaneous commerce is driving grocery sales, peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplaces are helping people find roommates, bitcoin continues to push record levels, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are questioning cloud storage security and specialty retailers are producing novelty connected commerce devices.

Here are the numbers:

$6 billion | Value of purchases made at grocery stores in the U.S. that fall into the category of spontaneous commerce — purchasing prompted by visual cues like putting typically high margin and/or not terribly expensive items at or near the places consumers pass often and/or are forced to stare at while waiting in line — which comprises approximately 1 percent of total grocery spend nationwide.

$17 million | Total funding raised by startup P2P marketplace Roomi, which provides a way to match those seeking shared housing with those offering a room. The platform lists more than 1 million users and 250,000 available rooms on its database.

$11,741 | The price of a single bitcoin as of Sunday (Dec. 3), with enthusiasts increasingly calling for the cryptocurrency to reach $100,000 (a potentially achievable reality in the near term). Its continued strength and mainstream appeal will continue pulling investors out of old school hedge investments and into the digital revolution, according to some arguments.

90 percent | Portion of SMBs that are at least “somewhat confident” in their cloud storage’s security, a 3 percent increase from 2015 figures. The statistic is still troubling, considering so many small businesses are lagging in cloud data security, according to McAfee Labs’ 2018 “Threats Predictions” report.

$34.90 | Retail price of Jim Beam’s novelty smart decanter, a device created in the spirit of other connected commerce items like smart speakers. The smart decanter is smart enough to talk to its users and “sass” them, too, all in the voice of the whiskey maker’s seventh generation master distiller Fred Noe.