Cyber Monday 2009 sales grew a mere 5% over 2008.
The sole exception was 2009, as recession-weary U.S. Since then, the holiday has seen double-digit sales increases almost every year. ComScore began tracking Cyber Monday sales in 2006 when shoppers spent $608 million online. In the retail industry, Cyber Monday is about as close as it comes to a slam dunk. Barbaro’s 2005 article noted that sales of sports and fitness equipment grew by 49% and furniture by 34% from 2004 to 2005, “suggesting that consumers are becoming more comfortable with the idea of buying a couch or treadmill online.” Cyber Monday Sales: Steady Growth in Any Economy So did consumers’ apparent willingness to buy unconventional items online.
Retailers dutifully played up the day as a natural extension of an already-popular shopping weekend and timed their best promotions accordingly.Įarly e-commerce innovations, like Gap’s virtual dressing room, heightened retailers’ and consumers’ collective sense of possibility. Though Cyber Monday wasn’t initially the biggest online shopping day of the year, NRF’s intuition wasn’t wrong consumers really did want to shop big on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Almost immediately, major online retailers (along with e-commerce platforms operated by brick-and-mortar retailers like Target and Walmart) began offering their own Cyber Monday deals unconnected to. NRF couldn’t keep Cyber Monday under wraps forever. Jumping on the Bandwagon: Cyber Monday Goes Big With so many other websites and retail platforms offering Cyber Monday deals, the original Cyber Monday site became a victim of its own success. Later, it became one of many affiliate-driven e-commerce sites offering win-win deals for consumers and sellers. NRF capitalized on Davis’s flash of marketing brilliance by launching the one-stop shopping site, a clearinghouse of sorts for post-Thanksgiving discounts and deals.Īt first, was pretty much the only place to find Cyber Monday deals. But the term stuck, and Cyber Monday was born. That honor fell to December 12, 2005, for reasons that will be forever lost to history.
In a hopelessly quaint New York Times article, Michael Barbaro recorded NRF’s expectation that the first-ever Cyber Monday would be the biggest online shopping day of the holiday season. In 2005, the National Retail Federation (through its commercial portal, ) decided to give the day a name: Cyber Monday, coined (per Fast Company) by a young NRF public relations executive named Ellen Davis. Before the smartphone era, consumers used the first workday after the long Thanksgiving weekend to check their favorite retailers’ websites for deals they might have missed at in-person Black Friday sales or more leisurely weekend trips to the mall. The Monday after Thanksgiving has been a popular online shopping day since the turn of the 21st century. When and where did Cyber Monday become a great day to save on holiday gift shopping? Here’s how it fits into the end-of-year holiday shopping season. Read on to learn about the history of Cyber Monday, what Cyber Monday and similar days are like around the world, and whether Cyber Monday and Black Friday are worth distinguishing between anymore. For $79 (or just $1.52 per week), join more than 1 million members and don't miss their upcoming stock picks. Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendations have an average return of 618%.