Traditionally the Friday post Turkey Day, was dominated by retailers promising great deals. If you were willing to get up early, wait in line for hours, and risk being trampled, you could grab that deal on the GPS or TV that you saw in the circular you read while you were recovering from tryptophan overload. Internet retailers waited patiently until the next Monday to offer their best deals of the season. This year the lines were blurred to a large degree by brick-and-mortar retailers offering Black Friday deals on their websites, and online retailers participating in the Black Friday fun as well. While retail in-store sales on Black Friday were up a slim .05%, online sales were up 11% with the average online purchase up 35%.
This led some to speculation that this early online shopping would take away from Cyber Monday. While that may be the case according to Akamai, global retail traffic spiked at 7,909,317 visitors per minute which is considerably higher than Black Friday traffic. CNN also reported that “about 96.5 Americans plan to shop online Monday, up from 85 million in 2008, according to the National Retail Federation.”
It will be a few days before we get all of the Cyber Monday stats, but so far the data looks promising.
Great post. However, I did notice that some brick-and-mortar retailers’ in-store deals were not offered online and vice versa. I look forward to seeing the latest Cyber Monday stats.