Cyber Monday (also known as Blue Monday) is the first Monday after the day of Thanksgiving, which has a goal to motivate people to shop online. In comparison with brick and mortar businesses that give their customers special deals and large discounts on Black Friday in order to accelerate their sales, Cyber Monday is an ecommerce event when online retailers offer special discounts and website-only deals. Cyber Monday is also considered the second biggest shopping event after Black Friday in the US.
As a term, “Cyber Monday” was coined by Shop.org, the online arm of the National Retail Federation (NRF) in 2005. NRF noted that their choice of Monday as the day for the event was due to the high amount of web purchases on the first Monday after Thanksgiving. There were a few theories regarding this increase in sales.
First theory is closely connected with the time period. Due to the low internet speed of home networks and the absence of high-tech devices such as smartphones and tablets in 2005, customers looked for desired items at physical stores and then purchased them online at work on Monday. The reason behind this is that offices were provided with a faster internet connection, which makes the process of online shopping more convenient at work. And if you would like to find out more about how technologies changed ecommerce, please go read our blog on how technology is changing ecommerce.
Second theory is associated with an unpleasant experience of going shopping on Black Friday. Since not everyone was looking forward to standing in line with a crowd of other people at dawn and fighting their way through others in order to purchase a discounted item, many customers could potentially decide to wait until Monday morning and purchase the same discounted item online without any hassle or risks.
With each year’s sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday beating records of the previous, American Express registered another annual holiday of Small Business Saturday with a non-profit organization The National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2010. This event encourages customers to “shop local” and therefore support small businesses and local merchants.
As an alternative to buying, a non-profit Mary-Arrchie Theater Company started a movement called Giving Tuesday (also listed as #GivingTuesday) in 2011. The goal of this movement is to promote charitable donations during the holiday season and as of today, many large companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and UNICEF have become partners for Giving Tuesday.
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