If you have Google Analytics on your curtain retail website, open it right now and look at the hourly traffic distribution.
What you will find, across almost every curtain and blind retailer website we have analysed, is that more than half of all web traffic arrives between 6pm and midnight. The most common single peak hour is 8-9pm.
This is when your showroom is closed. This is when your phone goes to voicemail. This is when your "get a quote" form sits waiting for a response that will not arrive until tomorrow morning.
The traffic pattern, by hour
| Time window | Traffic share |
|---|---|
| 9am - 12pm | 18% |
| 12pm - 3pm | 16% |
| 3pm - 6pm | 15% |
| 6pm - 9pm | 23% — evening surge |
| 9pm - 11pm | 18% — second peak |
| 11pm - 9am | 10% |
Aggregated Google Analytics, 89 curtain/blind retail websites, UK/AU markets, 2024.
The 8pm browser is not casually window shopping. They have put the children to bed. They have opened their laptop with the specific intention of figuring out their curtains. They are motivated, they have time, and they are in exactly the mindset to commit to an enquiry.
If your website gives them no way to get a price at that moment, most of them will go elsewhere. Not immediately — they will bookmark your site, tell themselves they will call tomorrow. But tomorrow comes and goes, and you never hear from them.
What happens when you are available at 8pm
Retailers who have added instant online quoting tools report a consistent pattern: 34-41% of their online enquiries now arrive between 6pm and midnight.
These are not enquiries redistributed from daytime. They are genuinely new enquiries that, under the old "contact us" model, simply did not exist. The 8pm customer was always there. They just had no way to engage.
The three things your website needs to work after hours
1. A visible starting price or price range.
The evening browser needs enough information to self-qualify before committing to an enquiry. If your website has no pricing at all, a meaningful proportion will leave without engaging — not because they are not interested, but because they cannot tell if you are in their budget.
2. An instant quote mechanism.
A simple form: window width, drop, style. Returns an estimated range in seconds. That range is enough to convert interest into engagement. The key is that the customer gets a number now, not tomorrow morning.
3. A confirmation that their enquiry has been received.
If a customer submits a form at 8pm and receives no acknowledgement until 9am the following day, the gap creates doubt. An immediate automated response — "We have received your enquiry and will be in touch within one business day" — costs nothing to set up and maintains the relationship overnight.
The revenue calculation — run it for your own business
Take your current monthly enquiry volume. Take your current conversion rate. Take your average order value. Now add 40% to your enquiry volume — a conservative estimate of what evening availability delivers.
For a retailer generating 40 enquiries per month at 25% conversion and £600 average order:
- Current: 40 x 25% x £600 = £6,000/month
- With evening availability: 56 x 25% x £600 = £8,400/month
- Difference: £2,400/month — £28,800/year
From a change that requires no additional staff, no extended hours, and no extra marketing spend.
The 8pm customer is the most valuable person on your website tonight. The only question is whether your website is ready to meet them.
Darius Baltunis has been building made-to-measure software for the curtain and blind industry since 2011.
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