For those of you that braved the elements, the mobs of rabid shoppers, and survived Black Friday, there is no rest for the weary. It’s now time for Cyber Monday!
Today officially kicks off the online Christmas buying season. It’s reported that greater than 80 percent of the leading online retailers will offer some sort of special promotion today. Their goal is to generate a similar kind of buying frenzy that filled retail stores on Black Friday.
Although as a marketing tool, the Web’s official holiday-shopping launch is gaining in importance, Cyber Monday still lags far beyond the phenomenon we call Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving.
A big issue that online retailers face is getting the word out that Cyber Monday even exists.
One of the key reasons that Cyber Monday is not better known, is due to the fact that the online world’s is still a relatively small piece of the overall shopping pie. The segment is quickly growing year by year but has a long way to catch up to traditional retail shopping.
The current estimate is Holiday Web business is expected to achieve about $44 billion in sales this year. But that only accounts for about 10 percent of all shopping for the holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation.
Even the label Cyber Monday is relatively new to consumers. The National Retail Federation created the term in 2005 on the notion that it was the first chance after the big Thanksgiving shopping weekend for office workers to shop at their work desk.
Despite the bad economy, Web retailers are still expecting to post a holiday sales increase of around 12 percent over last year, according to research firm – Forrester Research in Cambridge Mass.
Due to the economic slowdown, that number represents only about half the gain the online sector realized last year. The good news is that it’s far better than the flat or negative growth predicted for the retail sector as a whole.
So shut down that Solitaire game and start buying the way of the future – online.
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