Cyber Monday is finally here, the day when everyone can continue this weekend’s shopping spree online. Not that you had to wait until today. Online sales on “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, were up 22 percent over last year to $531 million, says comScore. Today’s e-commerce take is expected to be $700 million, bringing the total spent since November 1st to $10 billion. That’s about the same as all physical U.S. retail stores made on Friday alone ComScore expects online sales for this holiday season to total $30 billion, or 7.5 percent of consumer retail spending, when all is said and done.
And according to a survey conducted by Shop.org, 72 million Americans are expected to shop online today. It is not clear from the survey if those people will actually be making purchases, or just browsing.
CrunchGear lists some of today’s CyberDeals here. Even Google Checkout is getting in on the deal action, offering discounts at online retailers who use Checkout. BowlingBall.com or Cufflinks Depot, anyone? I didn’t think so.
Update: Seems like some e-tailers can’t handle the online stampede. Yahoo’s checkout system is suffering outages, and Sears’ site is down altogether. (Anyone noticing any other outages or slowdowns today, please report in comments).
Update 2: ComScore reports that online sales for Cyber Monday came in at $733 million, based on its panel.
Lots of cash.
Question - on the CrunchGear page are those Affiliate Links for CrunhcGear/TC?
Personally, I found the best deals online during Black Friday (such as Amazon’s promotion of a Toshiba HD-DVD player with 10 HD movies for $174). That deal has not been available during Cyber Monday.
Not sure it means much, just my anecdotal evidence of a bit of a contradiction…
I went through the process of ordering a bunch of books and electronics from Amazon over this past weekend. When I went to check out, their system indicated that almost all of the items I had selected wouldn’t be arriving until the first half of January. No good to me, so I canceled them all out.
If this is typical, if Amazon’s Christmas delivery capacity is already gone, then they may not get to participate fully in the rest of the sales season.
Who the hell uses the word “cyber” anymore?
The deals suck today. Most of the online merchants had their sales on Friday as well. Everyone is competing for the same dollars and waiting until Monday is not a good strategy. If online retailers wanted to one up black Friday they should have the sales on Thursday when everyone is at home and has access to a computer (for the most part).
Online has its advantages:
No lines, no rush, and no waiting for something that may or may not be available. The companies just need to make sure their servers are up to speed. Sears was down most of the day and when it was up all it generated were server connection errors.
And I agree with Sarah. Cyber? What’s next, ‘virtual’ online stores? I thought we were passed the virtual and cyber crap already.
The whole CyberMonday idea is such a load of arbitrary B.S. — and the backwardness of the thing is revealed in its very title… as Sarah @ #4 points out.
It makes a headline — which is all that the retailers are after anyway.
Artificial urgency… But most definitely NOT a one-day-peak affair (I seem to remember a previous year’s “Cyber” day, and how some reported that brick-and-mortar stores were going to beat online sales — judging by the “Cyber Monday” numbers…only to look foolish in January, as the real numbers started to come out.)
Neither Black Friday or Cyber Monday are the biggest shopping days of the year, although they do attract a lot of attention. The biggest shopping day of the year should be around the 12th, if 2007 falls in line with all the other previous years.
I looked around a bit and wasn’t too impressed by the specials. I don’t like when retailers try to lump too much to buy together.
You’ve just given BowlingBall.com and Cufflinks Depot the best bit of marketing they’ll ever have. There’s no such thing as bad PR
-JamieT
Cyber Monday was coined in ‘05 by Shop.org, an arm of the National Retail Federation. CyberMonday.com is their commercial side, a domain that’s really only useful one day out of the year, with a few hundred e-tailer deals listed. It’s interesting that the whole thing started when news spread a few years back that online sales jumped the Monday after T-giving, as consumers returned to work and took advantage of company broadband.
Now that a majority have DSL or better, most don’t need to wait to return to work today to shop. Granted, that fat pipe T-1 is nice! But the term ‘Cyber Monday’ is out there, and smart e-tailers could take advantage of it, promote some unique offerings (most offer free shipping today, that’s the common theme). I went to Amazon and other sites and came away underwhelmed. Black Friday, love it or hate it, has that frenzy and interesting feel to it … with people camping out like they’re waiting for the next iPhone. Cyber Monday, so far, is like comparing a fart to a hurricane.
I posted a thought in the Forum on a unique way to advertise for Cyber Monday (aimed at big etailers). If you just clod along with everyone else, and fail to do something memorable and unique to grab consumers, it’s just another day. As for media … where’s the creative producer who takes a camera team to eBay or Amazon today, to show how the big boys handle the rush?? It’s the typical table talk on CNBC and Fox Business, etc. Do some behind the scenes stuff on days like today, and it might just be interesting. Jeff Bezos leading a camera team around one of his shipping floors, all on Segue scooters. Can’t we make online as interesting as offline??
Walmart.com was having some major quirks earlier.
Sears was completely closed for online shoppers between 9am and 4:30pm on Black Friday according to a WebSitePulse report. Walmart had a problem today between 3:15 and 3:30pm and did not allow online shoppers to complete any purchase transactions.
For those living outside of the USA wondering what all this Black Friday and Cyber Monday talk is about; citing http://www.wikipedia.org:
“Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States, where it has served as the unofficial beginning of the Christmas season at least since the start of the modern Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924. The term ‘Black Friday’ has been traced back only to the 1970s.
The term Cyber Monday refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, …
http://www.felgner.ch/2007/11/customs_us.html
The highest traffic day for e-tailers tends to be the Monday or Tuesday three weeks after Cyber Monday, which is simply the start of the traffic ramp. So I feel sorry for any e-retail site having scaling problems yesterday!
Friday will be catalog friday!
Let me make one thing perfectly clear:
My disdain for Hellary has nothing to do with her supposedly being a woman! I love women and would vote for one for president readily. But, let’s not vote for Klinton just because of gender: think back to that administration, all of the spies, lies, corruption, deaths, smears, immorality, backstabbing, laws broken, drugs, bribes, Chinese spies, payoffs, character assinations, assasinations, investigations, using dead people, theft, obfescations, stealing china, destruction of public property, threats to bimbos, assaults, rape accusations, sex not sex, asprin factory murders, tyrant coddling, Whtewatering, Rose law firming, missing files, DNA disapearance, Foster bodies, Lies in diaries, lawyers commiting suicide, hidden agendas, payoffs, Luewinskiing, coverups, mismanagements, bodies in the parks, bodies in the cell, bodies in the water, nuclear secrets being sold, FBI files stolen, blackmailings, ….. all with Hellary right smack dab in the middle either orchestrating or covering up!
Use your memories people!
Other than that I have nothing against her.
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Actually, Cufflinks Depot is quite famous and most my friends get cufflinks and cufflinks boxes for their husbands from there. Not sure about BowlingBall.com though.
I’m serious.