Cyber Monday 2007 and the Upcoming Holiday Season

So what is Cyber-Monday and why are we talking about the holiday season in September?

Well, first Cyber-Monday has been coined in the last couple years as the Monday following the Thanksgiving weekend. So after everyone gets through tearing up the mall on Black Friday, 11/23 this year, then they go home and realize they haven’t gotten everything they wanted. So then on Monday, now Cyber-Monday, they get online and shop like mad people. Last year, that one day alone drove $608M in online sales.

Officially Cyber-Monday is not even the biggest online retail day of the year. The big days are actually the first and second weeks of December, the biggest day so far being December 13, 2006, when consumers spent $667M.

So why bring this up now? Because if you are a retailer and you don’t have your holiday season strategies and resources in place, you are definitely behind the curve. Summer should be the time that merchants are finalizing their approach.

If you are selling online and have not solidified everything, then its not too late!

But, get started now. Things will begin picking up in November and systems need to be perfected by then. When helping run a business a couple of years ago, we lost-out in a huge way because an unexpected but needed hosting migration left us with low SEO rankings and slow traffic. The only thing that saved our sales that year was a strong presence on Amazon and Shop.com.

So, if you haven’t started preparing yet, then get moving…the clock is ticking.

September 26th, 2007