Cyber Monday: Marketing Gimmick or the Biggest Online Shopping Day?

Five years ago, Shop.org published a press release: "While traditional retailers will be monitoring store traffic and sales on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), online retailers have set their sights on something different: Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, which is quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year." Ta-dah — the term "Cyber Monday" was born.

The only problem: it was mostly a marketing gimmick, according to comScore's analysts. Cyber Monday had never been the biggest day of the year for online retail sales — "nor has it ever been the heaviest online spending day of the season," comScore wrote this week. It was merely the first significant spike of the season, "far heavier than Black Friday," followed by weeks of continued heavy spending into mid-December. The real crown, they predicted, would go to Monday, December 13 (sometimes called "Green Monday") or Tuesday, December 14. Last year's heaviest day had been Tuesday, December 15, at $913 million.

As it turned out — and this is later context the November headlines could not have known — 2010 broke the pattern. When comScore tallied the season, Cyber Monday (November 29) ranked as the heaviest online spending day of the year at $1.028 billion, the first billion-dollar day in history and the first time Cyber Monday had topped the list since tracking began in 2001. Green Monday finished second at $954 million. The gimmick, it seems, eventually became the reality.