Forum Moderators: buckworks
Every reporter used to "know" that the day after U.S. Thanksgiving was "the busiest shopping day of the year." You heard it every year on TV. But it's not true. Probably never was.
“Cyber Monday,” the term coined for the Monday after Thanksgiving, comes on the heels of the busy “Black Friday” shopping day when many brick-and-mortar retailers begin turning a profit.The good news for online shoppers this year, is that “Cyber Monday” is becoming the Web shopping equivalent to “Black Friday” when retailers launch major sales and discounts to drive traffic, analysts said.
Excuse me, but most brick/mortar retailers except toy stores and Christmas tree lots are profitable all year. And a small number of niche business actually suffer during the Chistmas season.
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/thanksgiving/shopping.asp
[edited by: lorax at 1:14 pm (utc) on Nov. 27, 2005]
[edit reason] delinked [/edit]
This ia a case of retailing PR people and the media working together to create a mutually beneficial "event."
Other than the wild Saturday that precedes Christmas, sales are fairly even from early December thru--oddly--December 27th. There is no one-day burst of sales.
Year to year variations--even on a national level--probably have a lot to do with weather.
Online/catalog sales certainly end well before Christmas because of shipping delay. Our online holiday sales start about 2 months before and end about 10 days before the holiday.
Heck, I've been in retailing for decades and I never heard it called "Black Friday" until very recently.
Well, I'm at least two years behind you since I've only been in retail for 18 years, but Black Friday has ALWAYS been an event that we planned for (for months in advance) and highly anticipated. Sounds like you've been missing out.
That's a pretty stupid term for what is a joyous day.
You generally record losses in red ink and gains in black ink. Hence, "Black" Friday for retailers turning profitable.
This ia a case of retailing PR people and the media working together to create a mutually beneficial "event."
Maybe today that's true to some degree, but it was circumstances that created Black Friday. People are on vacation, usually with family, and have a four day weekend. Thanksgiving is now behind you and Christmas is just a short time away. People love to shop while on vacation so it's natural that the day/weekend after Thanksgiving creates an intensive shopping day. Retailers just learned to take advantage of this opportunity decades ago.
By decades of retail experience, I mean a lot more than two.
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Can't chat long. According to cable news, tomorrow's "Cyber Monday" the biggest event since Natalee Holloway disappeared, so I know our servers will be smoking. LOL.
Um..Yeah...Still waiting for the spike here in the U.S.
"Cyber Monday" was undoubtably created out of thin air in the mind of a PR flack somewhere.
I am seeing it for my affiliate sites. Sales are blasting today, but if memory serves me correctly, sales last year did not hit the high point on this monday. It was more of a start to the spike which toped out around the 14th or 15th.
That press release and the number of news sources that picked it up are a testament to the power of good PR.
They don't even claim that "Cyber Monday" is the biggest online shopping day of the year.
Excellent piece of non-news news.
In general, how many web stores do well on Mondays? Most, I believe, see peak traffic and sales mid-week.
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Still, the Cyber Monday appellation serves a PR purpose. If only web retailers could concoct some video of stampeding shoppers being electronically trampled and bloodied. That sort of predictable gimmickry has been a mainstay of day-after-Thanksgiving news reports for a century.
The 23rd of December is normally our biggest day BY FAR.
I had read last year that the 23rd/24th were actually the new B&M busiest shopping days of the year. Lots and lots of procrastinators out there. :)
They are refering to this Business Week article:
[businessweek.com...]
I think AdSense revenues may peak later than online sales as people browse online but buy offline in time to wrap and ship gifts.
Still, there will be a lot of overnight shipments on 22, 23, 24 December. USPS even ships overnight for Christmas Day (Sunday this year).
We're all flying high this week.
Let's go back a few decades. At some point in time, people did not line up outside stores at 4AM the day after Thanksgiving. Someone at some point in time created this myth of a Black Friday. Maybe there was some kernal of truth to it (just like there is to "Cyber Monday"). Maybe a few more people went shopping that day than typical but not significant amounts. But myths are pretty powerful things, even in marketing terms. When people believe them, they are conditioned. Merchants made special sales so they could attract more of these mythical customers they heard about which then drove more people to the stores on that day and *bam* a vicious circle is established and now you have wackos hanging outside Wal-Mart in 10F weather at 4AM on a Friday.
We are watching the beginings of that same process for the web. This year, we saw the first real stirrings of a turf war in the merchant space. Many big shops ran all their "Black Friday" specials online on Thanksgiving day in an attempt to keep people from shopping in stores on Black Friday. This isn't really a healthy thing for long term shopping growth. It is much better to get shoppers to spend money in both places (they spend more overall). Shop.org appears to have been trying to make the compromise.
They are trying to concede Thanksgiving by creating a special online day. They tell people that people shop on that Monday for things they couldn't find offline and *bam* every year you will have more and more people who will hit the internet on Monday to finish holiday shopping because that's what "everybody" does. Money that may have been lost because someone doesn't shop online and so therefore just doesn't buy the thing they couldn't find, will be recovered because that person will now do their shopping online on Monday for the same reason they stood outside Wal-Mart in 10F weather at 4AM on a Friday. Because everybody does it (isn't that what the news says?) so it must be okay to do and besides, that's how you get the best deals (or at least that's what they and the merchants are told).
That's not an official stand on it. That's my take on this.
I actually think it was a pretty smart marketing move for shop.org to do. The biggest obsticle right now with online shopping is all the news hype saying that "people are afraid to shop online". What better way to combat it than to have news hype about a day where everybody shops online?
Sites selling general consumer products had 7x times the normal sales yesterday on average.
Today it looks stronger, but I will not know until stats are updated later on Wednesday.
Overall it looks likes 10-15% increase over last year so far.
Good trend. Some sites thats were agressive in their product offerings are seeing 4x ytw increases.
When you say " general consumer products".. are you referring to toasters,shoes,and dvd's?
We sell auto performance products and really didnt see much of a jump...biz os still healthy, but the thanksgiving weekend wasnt anything out of the ordinary...
Congrats
Hannamyluv
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That's not an official stand on it. That's my take on this.
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Your thought processes are always excellent and insightful.
I actually think it was a pretty smart marketing move for shop.org to do.
Most of what good PR and marketing folks do is pretty smart. They've built a symbiotic relationship with news outlets to promote their agenda.
And, in this case, the ecommerce part of my brain is pretty happy about the push. At the very least, "Cyber Monday" marks the beginning on the online shopping season. And, anytime mainstream media highlights the magnitude of online sales, its a very good thing for us. (A lot of my customers that call in their orders still aren't familiar with and don't trust this whole online thing.)
But, the non-ecommerce part of me gets annoyed with this sort of thing. If you read the Shop.org press release and then the stories done by our "reputable" "news" "sources" you quickly realize how much "news" that you read is not really news at all. Its just whatever a PR flack and their willing accomplices cooked up. I guess I always assumed reporters did more actual reporting and less cut-and-pasting.
I guess spammers bought into that hype.
