We will not know if Black Friday 2008 was the success which both retailers and customers hoped it would be, but take a breath because December 1 is Cyber Monday.
Not to be outdone by the brick and mortar stores, the online merchants, and the online sites of the brick and mortar stores offer discounts on many products to kick off their season.
While it seems that Cyber Monday as been with us since the Apple II, the day was first named in 2005 and is actively promoted by Shop.org, an organization of the National Federation of Retailers (NFR). This trade group reports that 84% of online retailers will have Cyber Monday sales, up from 72% in 2007.
The NFR further predicts that nearly 56% of workers with internet access are expected to partake in the Cyber Monday sales, with men more likely to be cyber shopping than women. In the 18-34 year old buying group, 70% are projected to visit the Cyber Monday sites.
CyberMonday.com, sponsored by Shop.org, is the official promoter of the day. Subscribers to the site receive emails of just announced Cyber Monday deals. 600 retailers will have sales on Monday, the site claims. CyberMonday.com posts a merchant's ads as soon as it is available (usually Sunday, but sometimes Saturday), and serves as the portal to the merchants' websites.
Sales made through CyberMonday's "click throughs" result in a small percentage of the merchant's sale being donated to the Ray M Greely Scholarship Fund which provides scholarships to students in e-commerce. The percent donated is listed by each merchant's portal.
Cyber Monday deals typically differ from Black Friday deals in that on Cyber Monday there are few absolutely "drop dead" door busters which are very limited in quantity and are sold on a first-come, first-served.
More often, a website will have a percentage off on all sales or on a number of product lines, with a few deeply discounted items to grab the web surfer's attention.
Gottadeal.com, which is always a good site to visit to compare online deals, is currently listing online Black Friday deals at its landing, but over the weekend it would probably be a good idea to check their deals on their Cyber Monday page
While Cyber Monday is an active day for online retailers, their "big" day in 2007 and 2006 came about December 12, two weeks before Christmas and in time for the purchases to arrive.
In addition, the sales on Cyber Monday are only a fraction of the sales at bricks and mortar stores; in 2007 Cyber Monday brought in three quarters of a billion dollars in sales, less than 10% of the amount taken in on Black Friday that year.
And on a sobering note, Newsday reports that a 37 year old Wal-mart employee was killed Black Friday morning on Long Island, NY, when "A throng of shoppers . . . physically broke down the doors" and trampled the man. When the horror became apparent, store employees tried immediately to close the store but the shoppers refused to leave and continued shopping.
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