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Why Cyber Monday is Mostly Myth

From CNN Tech.

"It's mostly a marketing gimmick, according to consumer electronics experts and an online metrics tracker.

Cyber Monday has never been the biggest day of the year for online retail sales, said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore, a company that monitors internet traffic.

Typically, a Monday in December takes that title, and Lipsman predicted the biggest online retail day of 2010 will be on December 13."

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"What if Cyber Monday earned its name because of hot deals?

Also, not the case, according to independent experts.

Unlike Black Friday, which has a concentration of deals in brick-and-mortar stores, online sales tend not to fall on a certain day, said Mike Gikas, an editor for electronics and technology at Consumer Reports, the nonprofit group. The best deals on TVs, for instance, likely won't come until mid-December, he said.

Dan de Grandpre, editor-in-chief at DealNews, said products listed on sale on the Monday after Thanksgiving tend to be "the dregs" that didn't sell on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Some high-end retailers do hold Cyber Monday sales, he said, but some already started on Friday or Sunday and others won't begin until the second or third week in December."

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"The number of people shopping online on the Monday after Thanksgiving has grown steadily since 2005, when an estimated 59 million said they would shop online on that day, to 2009, when that number jumped to 96 million, Davis said.

Furthermore, she said, several online retailers are offering deals that are specific to Cyber Monday. Among those with deals, she said, are eBags.com, Ice.com, Drugstore.com, Soap.com, Diapers.com, LuckyBrand.com and Fashionbug.com.

But all of those sites were offering deals on Friday, too, meaning they weren't holding out for Cyber Monday promotions. Ice.com listed a "Black Friday Blowout Sale." Drugstore.com advertised "cyber week savings," instead of highlighting Monday.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to be learned from Cyber Monday is that Mondays -- after Thanksgiving or not -- are usually big days for e-commerce."

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"People used to think that Cyber Monday was big because workers were using high-speed office internet connections to do their online shopping, he said. Now that two-thirds of Americans have broadband connections at home, according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, that theory has been pretty much debunked."

Posted by Cute at 8:20 PM

Labels: financial (non-tax)