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The Truth About Cyber Monday

As I am sure you are aware, today is Cyber Monday.  A day supposed to be filled with discounts and deals for online shoppers.  While you will find many great deals, some are questioning whether Cyber Monday is real or just a smart business ploy.  It seems to be a bit of both.  Let me explain.

Just 4 years ago, in 2005, Shop.org coined the phrase ‘Cyber Monday’ in order to bring more traffic to their website.  A year later, hundreds of other online retailers jumped on board and started an Internet tradition.  While Black Friday, remains the biggest shopping day of the year, CyberMonday surprisingly is actually not the biggest online shopping day.  One year after Cyber Monday started, Scott Silverman, Executive Director for Shop.org, said “It was not the biggest day, but it was an opportunity to create some consumer excitement.” 

In fact, it has caused quite a bit of excitement.  There are now site’s dedicated to Cyber Monday, such as cybermonday.com, cybermonday.net, & cybermonday.fm.  Although the sites are supposed to be ‘CyberMonday’ deals, they are more of online holiday deals, not nessisarly limited to today.  That’s the key however, Cyber Monday deals don’t necessarily start on Monday. In fact many online retailers begin their online deals well before then.  Best Buy, along with several other companies offered exclusive online deals on Black Friday.  It was Amazon who dominated online deals on Friday.  Twitter is actually taking a bit of credit for Amazon’s Black Friday profits too, since the company did some major campaigning on the microblogging website.  Today, Amazon is using it’s Amazon’s Deal Twitter account to attract shoppers to their site offering lighting deals, offering a limited amount of items for sale for about an hour.  The deal ends after an hour or when the product is sold out.  Already today, a  number of items have been sold out compeletely in less than a minute.

A report from Permuto.com says that ‘Cyber Monday’ isn’t even close to being the busiest online shopping day, and that traditionally more online holiday deals happen between December 5-15. 

Looking for a deal today? Google has been in the holiday spirit for awhile now, offering passengers on Virgin America, free internet during flights, and even teamed up with over 47 airports nationwide to provide free wi-fi for travelers.  But now the search engine giant announced that they’ve teamed up with several online retailers to offer discounts between $5-$20, when you use Google Checkout.

Google’s blog says, “…through December 17, save with exclusive discounts of $5, $10 or $20 at hundreds of participatingstores, including TigerDirect.com, BlueNile.com and Petco.com.”

“And for Cyber Monday, you can take advantage of special limited-time offers available at Toysrus.com, Babiesrus.com and Buy.com. Visit our new Checkout deals page for more details and to browse participating stores. Finally, if you’re looking for gift ideas, check out the Product Search team’s list of popular products.”

Both business owners and shoppers can take advantage of Google’s new Mobile Coupon finder.  “If a business adds a mobile coupon to its Google Local Business Center listing, you’ll be able to access it from your mobile device,” says Google’s Moblie Blog.  “Just go to google.com on your phone and search for a local business. When you land on its Place Page, you’ll see any coupons or discounts that might be available. Then simply show the participating business the coupon, right from your phone, to redeem the offer.”