With Black Friday officially a resounding retail success, online merchants hope to share in the consumer spending spree today, Cyber Monday. Although it is really only the 12th busiest shopping day of the year according to Business Week, internet merchants have prepared an advertising blitz of a magnitude that boggles the mind. Just google "Cyber Monday" to see what I mean.Shop.org, a member of the National Retail Federation, gave birth to the idea for Cyber Monday in 2005, a week and a half before Thanksgiving. Based on the notion that the fever pitch of Black Friday would extend to online shopping when employees returned to work the Monday after Thanksgiving, the marketing "genuises" who created Cyber Monday overlooked the fact that access to the internet is far more common in the American household than they considered. In fact, a recent study indicates that 2/3 of American homes have internet access, thus buyers who want to continue their Black Friday shopping spree can easily do so from home on Friday night!
Despite the cutsie name and the media attention it has garnered, Cyber Monday is not as successful as anticipated. eCommerce analysts, after studying the web traffic of online merchants, report that the busiest online shopping days occur between December 5 and 15 in any given year. This statistic makes complete sense to me, as we've been selling online for 7 years and have always found that the last-minute shoppers come out in droves during this period. In 2005, the year when Cyber Monday was launched, a survey done by Shop.org revealed that online merchants reported December 12th as their busiest day of the year!
Although I don't plan to spend a lot of time looking for deals online this Cyber Monday, I will search for deals on a few things. Since I hate shopping to begin with, the idea of queuing up in a parking lot for a "door buster" deal is not at all appealing to me. Even though the prices are not as deeply slashed as those offered at 4 a.m. on Black Friday, I'd much rather scope out bargains from my far less crowded couch.
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