Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays

Cyber Monday is a marketing term first coined by Shop.org in 2005 based on research from online retailers reporting significant increases in sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2004. Cyber Monday represents some of the busiest periods of online purchases of the year for ‘e-tailers’

American’s surveyed by Cicinnati.com said they will spend an average of 14.4 hours shopping in stores during November and December, whilst the figure spent shopping online is considerably higher.

How big are the Cyber Monday’s and Black Friday’s, does it leave e-tailers with a good Saturday and Sunday feeling? Well traffic was big enough last year to affect Yahoo services for e-retailers to issue system unavailable messages on 26/11/07!

According to Google Retail Blog the top e-tailer days for spending (in Millions USD) for the 2008 festive priod was December 9th ($877M), followed by December 15th ($856M), whilst Cyber Monday spend was third highest for the period ($846M).

A year on year comparison, suggests that search terms on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday’s were up 20% for large US Retailer festive deals. Consumers were searching for keywords such as “Walmart Black Friday“, “Khols Black Friday Ad“, “Sears Black Friday Sales” and “Target Black Friday Deals Online“.

There is also an nonline world (a term coined by David Hughes). ‘It is a place where consumers live, where purchase decisions are not linear and not channel exclusive. In the nonline world consumers move between channels and each stop influences the final purchase. In the nonline world web and store are not mutually exclusive. To the customer all channels coexist and commingle peacefully’.

Walmart has developed the “Walmart Black Friday Store Map” which was an ‘Online In-store’ shopping strategy, they developed printable maps to indicate the exclusive deals during the Thanksgiving weekend and where in each store the deals were located.

A Digital Marketer’s View of Early A.M. Activities examines Pay-Per-Click, for “Black Friday” and notes:

• Black Friday advertisements are dominated by ‘large retailers’ with very little action from smaller players, likely due to the cost to compete. Additionally, some Black Friday entrepreneurs (coupon sites, blogs, etc.), and odd-balls like Visa, advertising under the flag of “savings,” have entered the conversation.

• Open competition exists between online only retailers like Dell and Amazon and multi-channel retailers, and the lines are blurring more than ever.

• Few maximize the budget they’re spending online by implementing according to best practice, and creating relationships beyond Black Friday.”

Check out the Google Retail Blog

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