Q: How many orders does Staples receive per minute?
I’m not asking how many gift card orders, just how many orders, period.
A: About 2 orders per minute, during daytime hours.
I was recently doing a bunch of Staples orders with the recent Amex offer (we have until Feb. 7) and I noticed that their Order Numbers follow each other pretty well. When I placed a second order, it was usually just a few numbers after the past one, placed minutes earlier.
This is in contradistinction with Walmart and Amazon. When I checked out a bunch of orders I made on their site, one after another, there were hundreds of thousands (Walmart) or millions (Amazon) in between the order numbers. They apparently randomize the numbers somewhat. This is possibly a security measure, or possibly so that close numbers won’t get mixed up, e.g. if a customer calls about an order they don’t want a single digit to confuse between two separate orders. This is the purpose of the last digit in credit cards numbers as well, from what I read.
However, Staples numbers seem to follow pretty closely, so I assume that they just do one after the next. I checked four separate occasions that I made Staples orders in quick succession over the past year, all during the afternoon. There was obviously a nice variation between them, but it seemed like about 2 per minute is a fair estimate.
Did you ever calculate Staples or another retailer? Let us know in the comments.
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The last digit in a credit card is the checksum. Google for “Luhn algorithm” and you’ll see how it works.
Thanks, I looked it up in Wikipedia.