Quick Analysis
Many of us heard the hype promoting Cyber Monday and though most of the current headlines are reporting the results as being positive, it's mostly in how you measure. Personally, I'm of the opinion that whatever success it's deemed to be is more about how you frame the question, than could easily be illustrated by some simple stats.
According to BusinessWeek, last year an association of online retailers decided that they needed a hook, something that they could use in response to the brick and mortar, Black Friday. It was decided that should focus on the Monday after Thanksgiving, because everyone would be back to work and able to use their faster internet connections to shop. Several possible names were batted around and on the 21st of November, Shop.org issued a release.
The press kit used an assortment of statistics and a few vague generalities; "becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year" and "sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving have been creeping higher". I can see nowhere, where it explicitly states that it's really the twelfth busiest online shopping day and that the event was a completely new invention.
Preliminary results show that on Monday, non-travel, online consumer spending increased by 26% or from $386 million to $485, year over year. This is the exact same percentage, online sales increased over the Thursday to Sunday holiday weekend, $737 million to $925. And, though traffic figures aren't yet available for Cyber Monday, preliminary stats for the actual Thanksgiving Day was up almost 19% and on "Black Friday", online retailers reported a 20.9% increase in clicks.
If Cyber Monday is to survive as a marketing tool, merchants are going to have to offer better and more heavily-publicized discounts and I'd say, they'd need to be beyond those pre-Black Friday sales offered on Thanksgiving Day. Though, right now and without knowing how the season will end, if we learned anything from this exercise, it'd be; Issue a press release during the slower holiday buildup and let the media feed on itself, spreading your word through osmosis and possibly causing a better than natural increase.
According to BusinessWeek, last year an association of online retailers decided that they needed a hook, something that they could use in response to the brick and mortar, Black Friday. It was decided that should focus on the Monday after Thanksgiving, because everyone would be back to work and able to use their faster internet connections to shop. Several possible names were batted around and on the 21st of November, Shop.org issued a release.
The press kit used an assortment of statistics and a few vague generalities; "becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year" and "sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving have been creeping higher". I can see nowhere, where it explicitly states that it's really the twelfth busiest online shopping day and that the event was a completely new invention.
Preliminary results show that on Monday, non-travel, online consumer spending increased by 26% or from $386 million to $485, year over year. This is the exact same percentage, online sales increased over the Thursday to Sunday holiday weekend, $737 million to $925. And, though traffic figures aren't yet available for Cyber Monday, preliminary stats for the actual Thanksgiving Day was up almost 19% and on "Black Friday", online retailers reported a 20.9% increase in clicks.
If Cyber Monday is to survive as a marketing tool, merchants are going to have to offer better and more heavily-publicized discounts and I'd say, they'd need to be beyond those pre-Black Friday sales offered on Thanksgiving Day. Though, right now and without knowing how the season will end, if we learned anything from this exercise, it'd be; Issue a press release during the slower holiday buildup and let the media feed on itself, spreading your word through osmosis and possibly causing a better than natural increase.