The term Cyber Monday refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season in the United States between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas. Whereas Black Friday is associated with traditional brick-and-mortar stores, "Cyber Monday" symbolizes a busy day for online retailers. The premise was that consumers would return to their offices after the Black Friday weekend, making purchases online that they were not able to make in stores. Although that idea has not survived the test of time, Cyber Monday has evolved into a significant marketing event, sponsored by the National Retail Federation's Shop.org division, in which online retailers offer low prices and promotions.

Origin of term

The term "Cyber Monday" is a neologism invented by Shop.org, part of the U.S. trade association National Retail Federation.. It was first used within the ecommerce community during the 2005 holiday season. According to Scott Silverman, the head of Shop.org, the term was coined based on research showing that 77% of online retailers reported a significant increase in sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2004.

Accuracy

In late November 2005, ComScore Networks, an e-commerce tracking firm, reported that online spending on Cyber Monday, excluding travel, was $485 million, a 26 percent increase from a year earlier. Total visits to shopping sites increased by 35 percent compared to a year earlier, according to Akamai Technologies. In late 2005, after the holidays, ecommerce sites reported that the busiest shopping days usually were between December 5-15 in a given year. For 2005, the year the term Cyber Monday was coined, the busiest online shopping day of the year in the U.S. was actually December 12, two weeks after "Cyber Monday". Shop.org's survey of its members found that their busiest day in 2005 was December 12. MasterCard's worldwide (not just U.S.) data for 2005 showed that the day with the highest amount of Web transactions processed was December 5. In November 2006, prior to the holidays, MasterCard reported that an online survey it had commissioned found that only 10 percent of Americans said they would shop on the Web on Cyber Monday.

Criticism

Some critics online and in the media have called for a boycott of the term, calling it a useless media buzzword with no basis in fact. Fark founder Drew Curtis critically mocks the term in his book It's Not News, It's Fark as a leading example of holiday-based "fluff journalism."

Website

At the official Cyber Monday site run by Shop.org, more than 500 retailers offered discounts for the 2007 holidays. As a Motley Fool article noted, many of these same deals can be found elsewhere. A percentage of the proceeds of the site benefits the Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund, which gives scholarships to students pursuing an education in e-commerce.

See also

• Buy Nothing Day, a day on which anti-consumerists refrain from shopping as a sign of protest.
• Hallmark holiday, a term referring to sentiment that certain holidays are largely contrived by corporations such as Hallmark to encourage consumption.

References

External links

• CyberMonday.com (Official site sponsored by Shop.org)
• Shop.org
• Snopes.com article on Cyber Monday
• Some Web stores aren't buying 'Cyber Monday', International Herald Tribune, November 23, 2007