Black Friday, the chaotic and frenzied shopping day after Thanksgiving is now a pretty well-known phenomenon. But savvy shoppers know that some of the best deals came the first day back at work after the holiday weekend. This quieter, bigger shopping day is known as Cyber Monday.
A New Shopping Trend Identified
The earliest reference to Cyber Monday appears to be an article from Shop.org in 2005 titled ‘Cyber Monday’ Quickly Becoming One of the Biggest Online Shopping Days of the Year. According to the article, sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving had been creeping higher each year.
The article speculated on several reasons for the increased shopping activity, better availability of high-speed internet at work, the chance to pick up items that you didn’t purchase on Black Friday, and being able to shop away from the prying eyes of children at home.
The article, which was written by an electronic retailing firm, suggested that online retailers were going to be offering terrific deals to sway shoppers to choose their website to make their purchases. From that point on, more and more shoppers began to look forward to Cyber Monday as much as they did Black Friday.
Marketing Hoax?
Bloomburg Businessweek was quick to discount the Cyber Monday story. They ran an article a week after Shop.org’s post revealing that the e-commerce association had largely drummed up the story and the idea of discounts by suggesting the idea to major online retailers. They later posted that the top online sales day of 2005 was December 12 – the Monday that came two weeks after the first Cyber Monday.
From Bloomburg’s article:
“The genesis of the concept goes back even further. Shop.org member Shmuel Gniwisch, chief executive of the online jewelry site Ice.com, recalls getting an e-mail from Shop.org last year [2004], suggesting that online retailers come up with their own marketing hook to match Black Friday. “The online guys got together and said, ‘Let’s give people something different,’” he says. “The reality is, we didn’t notice anything special” on the Monday after Thanksgiving.”
Marketing guru Seth Godin claimed in a blog post that his friend and co-worker from Yahoo!, Jerry Shereshewsky was party to the creation of Cyber Monday. According to LinkedIn, Jerry was a member of the Board of Directors for Direct Marketing Association, “Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Madison Ave” at Yahoo!, and Board Member of the VCU Brand Center in 2005. He was certainly wearing enough hats and is influential enough to help fan a new shopping trend into prominence.
Another name associated with the trend is Tony Valado, who is said to have suggested the idea of a post-Thanksgiving online shopping holiday in 2003, while he worked for 1-800Flowers.
The idea of Cyber Monday as a shopping deals day online was clearly engineered, but does that mean the current Cyber Monday holiday is entirely a myth?
Cyber Monday’s Rise to a Record-Setting Event
It took a few years for the new Cyber Monday shopping holiday to catch on. But eventually, it snowballed into a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Since 2010, the first year that Cyber Monday sales reached $1 billion in a single day, the annual increase has been a double-digit percentage. In 2012, shoppers spent $1.465 billion on Cyber Monday, making November 26, 2012 the highest grossing online shopping day in history. What’s more, Cyber Monday like Black Friday has spread internationally, even to countries that do not celebrate Thanksgiving.
Will that record be broken this year? We shall soon see.
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