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Now you can add "Cyber Monday" to that end-of-year fantasy list. Another year has come and gone and, as many predicted, by late in the day on the West Coast, Cyber Monday appeared to be just another busy holiday shopping day.
Retailers, of course, have breathlessly promoted the first Monday after Thanksgiving as a crucial day for online shopping, the day Web cash registers were supposed to be stuffed as bargain hunters got an early jump on holiday gift buying. But in all the effort to hype the day, somebody forgot to tell consumers.
"We didn't see any unusual (traffic) on the site," said Craig Berman, an Amazon.com spokesman, who added that the company's biggest day last year was December 12.
The term Cyber Monday was coined to help promote online retail and to build an Internet equivalent to Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and traditionally one of the busiest shopping days of the year for brick-and-mortar retailers.
As it turns out, Web stores don't need a new Black Friday. The old one works just fine.
Research firm comScore Networks said that Friday's Internet spending topped $430 million, a 42 percent jump from the same day last year.
"Our sales last Friday were three times higher than any Friday of the previous month," said Patrick Byrne, chief executive of e-tail store Overstock.com. "The holiday season starts like a tide coming in and out beginning in early November. The first tsunami wave hit on Friday."
Friday also saw some top retailers struggling to service all the visitors to their site. While site outages are never good, they are an indicator of large traffic spikes.
Shoppers swamped Walmart.com, rendering the site nearly inaccessible for 10 hours, the company said. Keynote Systems, which measures Web site performance, also noted a brief disruption at Amazon during a sale on deeply discounted Xbox 360 game consoles.
A Keynote spokesman said the company had not seen any similar issues among the top online retailers on Monday.
Put a fork in the myth So was Cyber Monday just a marketing tool to rev up online holiday spending? Sort of. Industry group National Retail Federation coined the term a year ago, but an NRF representative says it never meant to say it was the busiest online shopping day of the year."It's not a gimmick," said Scott Krugman, a spokesman for the NRF, which is based in D.C. "We never said that Cyber Monday was the busiest day of the year. The press picked that up and wrote what they wanted."
Krugman said the NRF created the term to describe a trend after a survey of online retailers discovered that holiday shopping began ramping up on that day. Retailers have used the term as an opportunity for the "ceremonial kickoff of holiday shopping," he said.
One can hardly blame executives at retail sites for steering people to virtual aisles as early as possible. A Web store is up against tighter deadlines than its offline competition.
Retail Web sites must ship holiday gifts, and that takes time. Many Web sites need orders placed by at least December 22 to guarantee delivery by Christmas day. That means that when brick-and-mortar stores are ringing up procrastinators and last-minute shoppers, the Web stores are effectively shut down. It's in the stores' interest to prod shoppers to shop early.
See more CNET content tagged:
Overstock.com Inc.,
Keynote Systems Inc.,
retailer,
holiday,
online retailer
Why else would it have a catchy little name for it? (it's not really
that catchy, but what do you expect from geeks?)
If people had any sense at all, they would have seen the steady
price hikes going on since about September so that retailers could
"slash prices" for the Black Friday sales, which put "sale prices"
right back at about the regular retail price. WOW! Maybe we should
line up like cattle/sheep EVERY day?
The majority of online businesses are not multi-million dollar companies, which you see mentioned in nearly all of these "news" posts. Many are simply websites of larger brick and mortar retailers, and online retailing isn't a focus.
From our perspective, November itself - usually around the end of the first week of the month, normally signals our holiday peak. As mentioned from amazon representatives, our peak last year focused around December 10 - 12th. In fact, this period was so large last year, those 3 days alone represented about 15% of our entire gross retail sales for the year, which is very impressive.
The largest challenge for most online retailers is in the areas of customer service, and shipping deadlines. As mentioned, we are truly up against a more constrictive deadline for shipping products to online cusotmers. The other challenge is customer service - which is the single most important area year round, and especially at the holidays.
People who purchase online are (understandably) concerned about gift delivery, and also the fact that they are dealing with a "real" company. Those smaller retailers who offer fair pricing, and the best service, are successful. Bottom line is that communication is king - more so than pricing, which is usually only a few dollars more or less. Companies who maintain proper facilities to communicate with customers have more expenses involved - ergo pricing that is usually slightly higher.
So - while there isn't a clear cut "Black Monday" yet, it may well become so in the near future as more people shop online to avoid the lines!
It never had anything to do with special sales, at least in my memory.
The true internet shopping peak is indeed around December 10-12 because that is usually the time that sites start giving cut-offs for standard shipping at zero or significantly lower cost than the premium shipping required beyond those days.
K. Hansen
K. Hansen
I had the same sale on Wednesday 11/22 as there was on Friday 11/23.
TVs might be an exception- but no smart person is going to buy a cheap WAlmart TV discounted $200.
According to the Akamai Net Usage Index, which tracks visitors per minute to an aggregated group of more than 270 global e-commerce sites, Cyber Monday traffic was 14.6% higher than Black Friday.
- Cyber Mondays is nothing compare to Black Friday
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by Cheit
November 29, 2006 6:53 AM PST
- Well lets see at best buys cyber monday offers and was the same usual stuff every day only "Free Shipping", my god !!! are they thinking we are stupids?
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1 | 2 | Next 10 Comments >>Beside a 300 Gig External DH on stamples on black friday was 100 dll but on best buy was 180 dll the same one.
Really, cyber monday is not big deal