NOW
The Commerce Acceleration Index
How fast does this website want you to act?
NOW is being assembled in the open. It records what commerce pages actually said at a stated moment, with the evidence attached, so a claim about pressure can be checked rather than taken on trust.
Five dimensions are now measured across the whole panel in one cross-sectional pass: every retailer against the same snapshot, the same frozen ontology and the same frozen detector. It still does not issue a score. Nothing here has been through independent human review, and the bar a dimension must clear was written down before the review was sent.
Higher pressure is not a synonym for worse. A deadline can be real, a stock count can be accurate. NOW measures presence, form and placement. Whether a claim is truthful is a separate question this instrument does not answer.
The corpus, as counted
The rest were hard-blocked, errored or 404. A block is a coverage gap, never an absence of pressure.
Across 96 retailers, every one against the same pinned snapshot.
Each carries its mechanism, a verbatim window and the hash of the page it came from.
Corpora dated 2026-09-06 · baseline run 2026-09-06T18-15-baseline-01 · dataset now-dataset-2
Ontology now-observation-v1 · detector now-v1-detector-1 · split now-v1-split-1
Detector observed — independent human review pending.
What the detector observed, 6 September 2026
- Urgency20 of 241 pages · 13 of 96 retailers
- ScarcityExperimental23 of 241 pages · 13 of 96 retailers
- Promotion169 of 241 pages · 72 of 96 retailers
- Shipping Pressure118 of 241 pages · 57 of 96 retailers
- Payment Softening16 of 241 pages · 11 of 96 retailers
What is measured
Holdout figures below are author-adjudicated, blind to detector output and made against a frozen ontology. They are not independent and do not satisfy the acceptance criteria; they set expectations for what independent review might find.
| Dimension | Pages with signal | Retailers | Precision | Recall | F1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Urgency A claim that adds a reason to act sooner through TIME. The pressure is a deadline, a clock, or a bounded event. | 20/241 | 13 | 100% | 83% | 91% |
| ScarcityExperimental — evidence base currently limited. A claim that adds a reason to act sooner through SUPPLY: how much is left, or how fast it is going. | 23/241 | 13 | 80% | 80% | 80% |
| Promotion A commercial inducement on price or value. Presence of a discount, code, bundle or gift. Explicitly NOT a time claim. | 169/241 | 72 | 100% | 96% | 98% |
| Shipping Pressure Fulfilment used as an inducement: a spend threshold that unlocks shipping, a cut-off that protects a delivery date, or expedited delivery offered as a benefit. Ordinary logistics copy is excluded. | 118/241 | 57 | 100% | 80% | 89% |
| Payment Softening The price is made to feel smaller by changing how it is paid: split into instalments, deferred, or expressed as a small periodic figure. | 16/241 | 11 | 100% | 92% | 96% |
What is not measured
The three-page model observes home, category and product. Checkout and cart are not observed at all, and the earlier cart pass reached 9 of 63 observable retailers against a 60% threshold predeclared before that run. There is no honest way to score it.
No observation method exists. Reserved, not measured.
Shown as unmeasured rather than as zero. A dimension nobody has looked at is not a dimension scoring nothing.
Why no composite is issued
No dimension has been through independent human review. The acceptance criteria were recorded before the 181-item blind package was sent, and until it comes back no dimension can be shown to clear them.
A dimension may enter a composite only if independent review supports precision of at least 90%, recall of at least 75%, an F1 of at least 80%, at least 10 independently judged positive examples, and no unresolved ontology defect that materially changes the construct. A composite needs 4 of 5 dimensions to clear all five.
Those thresholds were recorded before the review package was built, and the file is hashed. A bar chosen after seeing the score is not a bar.
Data, citation and reuse
- Observed
- 6 September 2026, 16:22 to 16:49 UTC: one pinned capture, baseline run 2026-09-06T18-15-baseline-01.
- Sample
- 114 US online retailers. 265 pages attempted, 241 open and scanned, across 96 retailers.
- Published
- 22 September 2026. Data last updated 22 September 2026.
- Download
- now-observations-2026-09-06.csv: 1,855 rows, one per page and dimension, blocked pages and unmeasured dimensions included. Every count on this page can be recomputed from it: a page counts for a dimension when detector_presence is true.
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0: reuse it freely, with attribution to Griotta and a link to this page. Quoted retailer text shown on the receipts is not part of the dataset and is not covered by the licence.
- Cite as
- Griotta (2026). NOW: commerce pressure observations, 114 US retailers, baseline of 6 September 2026 (dataset now-dataset-2). https://griotta.com/now
Part of Griotta Research.
Related: how buying became faster than deciding · the Impulse Buying Test, the same mechanisms staged · spending interception, a pause before the purchase.
Retailer records
Detailed records exist for ten retailers, chosen before any signal was read. The v1 pass covers all 96 scanned retailers; the rest are listed with their coverage.