Online merchants should know that while a lot of people are jumping for Black Friday sales, there’s also the recently popular trend of online shopping the following Monday, which was dubbed “Cyber Monday” after online retail sales following Thanksgiving jumped substantially. With a long holiday weekend for most shoppers, the mindset is still on holiday gift buying and online retailers should still consider the benefits of successful preparation for the big day.
According to data presented by comScore (via the Wall Street Journal), this past Monday’s online sales have jumped up 24% to $599 million. Interestingly enough, online sales went up 42% on Friday — but online sales only reached $434 million that day.
Hitwise also presented data that showed a 13.3% sales increase compared to Cyber Monday 2005.
Regardless of the “accurate” statistic, one thing is certain: early preparation for big shopping days will only help you (and your customers). Fortunately, the WSJ states:
Although considered the unofficial start of the online-shopping season, Cyber Monday isn’t the busiest of the year. Last year, it was the ninth-biggest day for online shopping, market researchers said.
Looks like there’s still time (albeit not much) to prep for the busiest shopping day of the year, which seems to be around December 12th.
I was on the look out for online deals and didn’t find many this week.
I looked as well. There weren’t many — not like Friday — and the sites that were dedicated to Cyber Monday were mostly inaccessible throughout the day. The trend is bringing people to the few sites dedicated to whatever deals are available and bringing them down due to unexpected excessive server resource use.
Deals or not on Cyber Monday, people are still looking to buy and sales are still going up.