Back to the December 2007 issue.

Cyber Monday Heats Up the Holiday Shopping Season

(by Craig Cooke, CEO)

Traditionally, the big kick-off to the holiday shopping season is Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. While this is still the case, a new day has emerged as an important indicator of holiday shopping activity. It is called Cyber Monday, and it is the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Consumers tend to shop at traditional stores over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and then on Monday, they decide to jump online to continue their shopping activity. This makes sense as consumers get to perform their own product research by holding items in their hands, inspecting the features and quality of a particular product, then go online Monday at work to quickly find the best deal.

Cyber Monday for 2007 established a new record (what’s new, every year a new record is made with online shopping) with $733 million in sales according to ComScore. Even though this is the biggest online shopping day ever, experts predict a repeat of last year when a new record was established on Cyber Monday only to be surpassed by the second Monday in December.

With Cyber Monday growing in popularity, eretailers are now taking advantage of this official online holiday kick-off. Sites are now using Cyber Monday to launch promotions and rich-media ad campaigns, and to deliver targeted emails to consumers. In fact, 67 percent of the largest ecommerce sites delivered promotional emails on Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday looks like it is here to stay. It might be classified as a gimmick, but retailers are always looking for an excuse to promote their products, and shoppers love to participate. If you have a consumer oriented website, and you haven’t taken advantage of this online kickoff, plan on it for next year. It will only keep getting bigger and bigger until one day, it may even surpass Black Friday as the number one holiday shopping kick-off day.

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Statistics Corner

Wireless subscribers in the U.S. have surpassed 250 million, according to a report released by industry group CTIA.

According to a study by Netpop, forty-six percent of Chinese broadband users look to search engines, versus 25 percent of American broadband users, when making purchase decisions.

The DMA recently reported that seventy-two percent of web users prefer ad-supported sites versus subscription-based sites.

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