Cyber Monday -- Brilliant! How Was Your Traffic?

Busy day for us and we sell little about Christmas

[jsinger]

I've always thought the people (National Retail Federation is usually given that credit) who conjured up the idea of an online equivalent to Black Friday were brilliant. Like Black Friday, the choice of day is pure balony. A PR gimmick that started in 2005. But a gimmick that works!

Just glanced at our stats programs: Our online traffic and sales were up about 25% from what I would have expected on a normal Monday (fairly slow day, usually). We sell very few gift or Christmas items.

Cyber Monday has become self fulfilling as TV carried stories all day about the "event," generally extolling the benefits of online shopping. Of course, they couldn't resist mentioning security risks of all kinds.

Curious how other sites did, especially gift related sites.

[buckworks]

I went shopping yesterday. I got a significant discount on every item I ordered, including 50% off something I'd been wanting for a while. In some cases I got free shipping as well.

People like me would make yesterday's sales stats look great ... but now I'll be doing no more buying for a while until the credit cards recover!

I have to wonder:

Does "Cyber Monday" really encourage more sales, or does it just rearrange the timing of purchases that people wanted to make anyhow, closing those sales at lower margins?

Is it really a good idea to train your customers to wait for discounts?

[HRoth]

Cyber Monday was a slow day for me, as has been the case in the past. Nor did I myself spend anything online.

[mattb]

Ours was slower than last year, although it was a bump up from most regular Monday's.

[jsinger]

Something new this year or last that I just learned of are all those dedicated Cyber Monday websites with coupons or the like. I think it was CNN that spent some time yesterday talking about several of them as places to kick off your CM spending.

Bet the B/M people at Penney's and Macy's were doing a slow burn all day about the way the web has muscled into their "club."

Is it true what theyre saying about the web now being 7% of retailing? That's amazing to me.

[rachel123]

Ours was great, and our widgets do not lend themselves well to gifts.

Sales were four times those of a typical day. Insanity.

[piatkow]

Is it true what theyre saying about the web now being 7% of retailing?

But how much is of that is replacement of mail order? Also I was in a furniture store at the weekend where orders taken in-store are processed through the public web site.

[Rugles]

Sales were four times those of a typical day. Insanity.

Could that be because the majority of your customers were on vacation from Wednesday of last week. Therefore what you experienced was pent up demand after an extra long weekend?

[rachel123]

Could that be because the majority of your customers were on vacation from Wednesday of last week. Therefore what you experienced was pent up demand after an extra long weekend?

Possibly, although a good slice of our demographic is retired and we haven't experienced similar spikes following other long-weekend holidays - and sales for Friday, Saturday were on par with normal (Turkey Day itself was slow).

I'm not convinced myself that it was completely a 'cyber-monday' phenomenon, but it was odd enough for me to sit up and take notice.

[Digmen1]

Is it true what theyre saying about the web now being 7% of retailing? That's amazing to me.

Do you mean amazingly good ? or amazingly bad ?

To me 7% online after 15 years of online retailing is not very good.
If you take Ebay, Amazon, plus bricks and mortar shops websites, that does not leave very much for all the websites (ours) online activities.

And are airfares etc included in that 7% ?

I will be amazed (impressed) when the figure gets to 25%.

[jsinger]

To me 7% online after 15 years of online retailing is not very good

Damn good considering other retailing has been around for a few thousand years and modern department stores go back about 160 years. First modern malls date to about 1920.

Considering the fixed costs of conventional retailing and retail real estate, a small drop in demand creates huge problems. See-thru malls for example. You know how many small town budgets are dependent on the sale tax collections of the local mall?

[trinorthlighting]

We had record traffic. This was also our first year of cutting all paid advertising as well and depending on natural SERPS.

[MrHard]

Always though this was just a catchphrase, no reason to think otherwise here.

[D_Blackwell]

Average across the board. We are in pretty steady niches. They all take after Christmas slowdowns for a month, and pre-back-to-school hits for a month. But we also have a couple of months a year that always show a good bump to the upside. Average these days is pretty darn good, IMO and our CPS is steady.

[mvander]

Our sales were very good on Cyber-Monday.

Actually the entire weekend we saw record breaking sales.

It started early Friday and started to slow down back to normal on Tuesday.

This year though, we did prepare much better.

1)Had a really great sale ready to go Friday at Midnight
2)Sent a newsletter out the Wed before Thanksgiving about the sale.
3)Add in Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

All those variables together = huge sales increase :)