CNN reported Nov. 29 on the fallacies associated with Cyber Monday, the online shopping phenomenon that occurs the Monday after Thanksgiving. It is commonly known as THE day to shop via Internet. Many people enjoy scouring for savings while bored at work or shopping in their jammies.
Shop.org, the website that coined the term “Cyber Monday,” shared some impressive statistics about Cyber Monday’s popularity. They claim that nine in ten online stores will hold special Cyber Monday sales. Read a little further, though, and we find out that they only surveyed 51 stores. Of those, only 21 said their offers are specific to that day; the remainder are holding sales merely to get rid of what they didn’t sell over Black Friday weekend.
Recent studies further confirm that Cyber Monday isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This day is never the largest “e-commerce” day of the year; it usually places seventh to ninth. The biggest day for online shopping usually happens on a mid-December Monday. Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore, a company that measures online traffic, told CNN he predicts the number-one day for e-commerce in 2010 will be December 13.
Besides procrastination, the increase in online retailer traffic in mid-December could be due to another Internet event: Free Shipping Day.
Friday, December 17 marks the third-annual day in which hundreds of online retailers agree to offer free shipping for 24 hours on all or most orders with guaranteed delivery by Christmas Eve. The stores involved in Free Shipping Day are listed on FSD’s website and more retailers are joining the event all the time, with an expected 1,000-plus by the seventeenth.
A year after the peak of the nation’s economic crisis, experts predict sales this December to increase 3.2% since December of 2009.
