Web Merchants Celebrate ‘Cyber Mon.’
Millions of shoppers were expected online Mon., fueling a shopping frenzy that began the day after Thanksgiving. Brick-and-mortar merchants celebrate Black Fri., but Web retailers genuflect to Cyber Mon., emerging as one of the year’s biggest Internet shopping days, analysts said. Roughly 59 million people were expected to shop online Mon., the National Retail Federation (NRF) told us. Meanwhile, e-tailers did well on Black Fri. and even better on Thanksgiving Day.
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About 77% of online outlets said sales grew dramatically last year the Mon. after Thanksgiving, a trend driving 2005 online discounts and promotions, a Shop.org/BizRate eHoliday Mood Study indicated. The bump in Web traffic on office broadband connections, despite the proliferation of at-home broadband, could stem from faster or more secure Internet links at work or lack of time to finish shopping over the weekend, NRF said. Analysts also expected countless consumers to shop from home after work Mon.
More than 1/3 of consumers polled -- 51.7 million - told Shop.org they'd use Internet access at work to browse or buy gifts this holiday season. More than half of 18-24s -- and nearly half of 25-34s -- said they would be shopping online at work. Men (42%) are likelier than women (32%) to shop at the office, NRF said.
Retailers greased the Cyber Mon. wheels with incentives to buy online. About 43% of e-commerce sites planned special promotions and discounts on Cyber Mon. Barnes & Noble offered 35% off DVDs, free gifts with toy and game purchases and free shipping for orders over $25. CompUSA touted one-day sales on LCD monitors, photo printers and portable DVD players. Home Shopping Network visitors had 3 hours to preview “pricebuster” items online before they went on TV. Macys.com raffled off a trip to next year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade or $50,000. Others touted free shipping on select items or upon exceeding specific sums, NRF said.
The biggest Cyber Mon. 2004 winners sold jewelry and luxury items, with 89% of sites seeing substantial sales jumps, and CE sellers at 86%, NRF said. Retailers offering food, beverages or other gourmet items (83%) and furniture and home decor (80%) also saw sales surge above average.
Despite wide awareness and technical upgrades for Cyber Mon., most large entities aren’t really ready for the holiday shopping season, said Jeffrey Rayport, co-author of Best Face Forward: Why Companies Must Improve Their Service Interfaces with Customers. He said the sales game will go to retailers that understand the online customer is in control, and have user-friendly contact structures to handle the sales uptick via automated channels through Dec. Holiday sales’ center of gravity has shifted and customers are learning “multi-channel shopping behaviors,” Rayport said. The same pattern boosts the risk of losing human contact in managing customer service increases.
Too often, holiday retail activity is measured only by gross revenue or sales per square foot -- often an incomplete gauge of how companies are doing with customers, Rayport said. “In an increasingly competitive economy, customer-facing organizations must be deliberate in how they strike a balance between transactional efficiency and the human touch,” he said: “At stake is what the business is all about - the meaning of the brand, the pace of business growth and the bottom line.”
Sites Win Big on Black Fri.
Black Fri. data for online retailers showed the Web to be a vital component in many Americans’ holiday shopping, said Nielsen/NetRatings. The firm’s Holiday eShopping Index saw a 29% rise the day after Thanksgiving, with a unique audience of 17.2 million across 100-plus representative online retailers. That’s compared with 13.3 million the same day in 2004.
Fri.’s fastest growing retail category -- toys and videogames - saw 152% week-over-week growth, fueled by Xbox 360’s release and portable game consoles’ continuing popularity, Nielsen said. CE products trailed closely with 142% growth and PC hardware/software rounded out the top 3 with 102% growth, the analysts said. Week-over-week Holiday eShopping Index overall growth was 39%, Nielsen said.
Complementary to Nielsen’s findings, Keynote said major online retailers delivered better-than-expected performance and reliability through the busiest portions of the year’s biggest shopping weekend. Sites for Costco, Office Depot, Amazon, JC Penney and Wal-Mart all delivered close to normal times for completing typical shopping transactions, Keynote Senior Web Analyst Roopak Patel said.
Overall reliability got as low as 96%, but few individual sites dipped below 95% Thurs. morning through Sun. afternoon. Unlike 2003-04, major sites reported no serious problems, indicating retailer IT departments. anticipated traffic spikes and large loads on Web and database servers, Patel said.
Thanksgiving Day registered as Web retailers’ peak day of the year for the 3rd year running, surpassing previous Black Fridays for online stores, Hitwise reported. That firm’s index of 100 online retailers showed 18.8% growth in Thanksgiving Day visits compared with 2004 and a 20.9% rise in Black Fri. visits versus the same time last year. For the weeks before Thanksgiving, visits to retail sites were showing moderate single digit growth compared to 2004, but boosts in market share of visits Thurs. and Fri. were seen as “encouraging signs for both online and offline sales,” Hitwise Gen. Manager- Research Bill Tancer said.
Wal-Mart’s site drew analysts’ attention with a big rise in holiday traffic. In a first since 2003, when Hitwise began tracking U.S. Internet users, Walmart.com passed Amazon.com in market share of visits. Walmart.com’s market share of visits grew 98% Wed.-Thurs. The firm expects 2005 to be its biggest holiday season ever, anticipating 160 million-plus Web visits through Dec. -- 60% over 2004, a spokeswoman told us. Site administrators expected more than 3 million visits Cyber Mon. alone, but expect more traffic through mid-Dec., predicting 25 million-plus weekly visits those weeks.
Major e-commerce sites start preparing for the holiday season in June by testing and sometimes bolstering their Web operations, Keynote said. The sites are typically ready by mid-Oct., Patel told us. Among the sites monitored by Keynote, Nordstrom ranked highest for online help and support, Amazon.com had easiest checkout, eBay had the best product research and browsing capability, and Barnes & Noble had the top search engine, Research Dir. Bonny Brown said.
The National Consumers League (NCL), the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) offered advice to help consumers have safe online shopping experiences. Web users should know what sites they're dealing with and check unfamiliar sellers with the BBB and state and local consumer protection agencies, they said. Buyers should get sellers’ names and physical addresses, cost, shipping fees and sellers’ privacy, cancellation and return policies, the watchdogs said. And consumers should gauge the extent that sellers protect transaction security via encryption techniques and browser security symbols.