Cyber Monday likely to be busiest online sales day

In this photo from Decem­ber 2008, an Amazon.com employee grabs boxes off the con­veyor belt to load in a truck at their Fern­ley, Nev., ware­house. Cyber Mon­day, coined in 2005 by a shop­ping trade group that noticed a spike in online sales on the Mon­day after Thanks­giv­ing when peo­ple returned to their work com­put­ers, is the next in a line of days that stores are count­ing on to jump­start the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son. This year it is expected to be the biggest online shop­ping day of the year for the third year in a row. (Asso­ci­ated Press file | Scott Sady)

MAE ANDERSON

AP Retail Writer

NEW YORK — Bye-bye Black Fri­day. So long Small Busi­ness Sat­ur­day. Now, it’s Cyber Monday’s turn.

Cyber Mon­day, coined in 2005 by a shop­ping trade group that noticed online sales spiked on the Mon­day fol­low­ing Thanks­giv­ing, is the next in a series of days that stores are count­ing on to jump­start the hol­i­day shop­ping season.

It’s esti­mated that this year’s Cyber Mon­day will be the biggest online shop­ping day of the year for the third year in a row: Accord­ing to research firm com­Score, Amer­i­cans are expected to spend $1.5 bil­lion, up 20 per­cent from last year on Cyber Mon­day, as retail­ers have ramped up their deals to get shop­pers to click on their websites.

Amazon.com, which is start­ing its Cyber Mon­day deals at mid­night on Mon­day, is offer­ing as much as 60 per­cent off a Pana­sonic VIERA 55-inch TV that’s usu­ally priced higher than $1,000. Sears is offer­ing $430 off a May­tag washer and dryer, each on sale for $399. And Kmart is offer­ing 75 per­cent off all of its dia­mond ear­rings and $60 off a 12-in-1 multi­game table on sale for $89.99.

Retail­ers are hop­ing the deals will appeal to shop­pers like Matt Sex­ton, 39, who for the first time plans to com­plete all of his hol­i­day shop­ping online this year on his iPad tablet com­puter. Sex­ton, who plans to spend up to $4,000 this sea­son, already shopped online on the day after Thanks­giv­ing known as Black Fri­day and found a lap­top from Best Buy for $399, a $200 sav­ings, among other deals.

“The descrip­tions and reviews are so much bet­ter online so you can com­pare and price shop and for the most part get free ship­ping,” said Sex­ton, who lives in Queens, N.Y., and is a man­ager at a util­ity company.

Sex­ton also said that it’s eas­ier to return an online pur­chase to a phys­i­cal store than it had been in pre­vi­ous years. “That helps with gifts,” he said.

How well retail­ers fare on Cyber Mon­day will offer insight into Amer­i­cans’ evolv­ing shop­ping habits dur­ing the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son, a time when stores can make up to 40 per­cent of their annual rev­enue. With the growth in high speed Inter­net access and the wide use of smart­phones and tablets, peo­ple are rely­ing less on their work com­put­ers to shop than they did when Shop.org, the dig­i­tal divi­sion of trade group The National Retail Fed­er­a­tion, intro­duced the term “Cyber Monday.”

“Peo­ple years ago didn’t have … con­nec­tiv­ity to shop online at their homes. So when they went back to work after Thanks­giv­ing they’d shop on the Mon­day after,” said Vicki Cantrell, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Shop.org. “Now they don’t need the work com­puter to be able to do that.”

As a result, the period between Thanks­giv­ing and Cyber Mon­day has become busy for online shop­ping as well. Indeed, online sales on Thanks­giv­ing Day, tra­di­tion­ally not a pop­u­lar day for online shop­ping, rose 32 per­cent over last year to $633 mil­lion, accord­ing to com­Score. And online sales on Black Fri­day were up 26 per­cent from the same day last year, to $1.042 bil­lion. It was the first time online sales on Black Fri­day sur­passed $1 billion.

For the hol­i­day season-to-date, com­Score found that $13.7 bil­lion has been spent online, mark­ing a 16 per­cent increase over last year. The research firm pre­dicts that online sales will sur­pass 10 per­cent of total retail spend­ing this hol­i­day sea­son. The National Retail Fed­er­a­tion esti­mates that over­all retail sales in Novem­ber and Decem­ber will be up 4.1 per­cent this year to $586.1 billion

But as other days become pop­u­lar for online shop­ping, Cyber Mon­day may lose some of its cache. To be sure, Cyber Mon­day hasn’t always been the biggest online shop­ping day. In fact, up until three years ago, that title was his­tor­i­cally earned by the last day shop­pers could order items with stan­dard ship­ping rates and get them deliv­ered before Christ­mas. That day changes every year, but usu­ally falls in late December.

Even though Cyber Mon­day is expected to be the biggest shop­ping day this year, indus­try watch­ers say it could just be a mat­ter of time before other days take that ranking.

“Of all the bench­mark spend­ing days, Thanks­giv­ing is grow­ing at the fastest rate, up 128 per­cent over the last five years,” said Andrew Lips­man, a spokesman with comScore.

Posted by AP News on Nov 25 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.