Cyber Shopping
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Cyber Shopping
We’ve all heard the term Cyber Monday, but did you know how it got started? Here’s a brief history of the very familiar cyber shopping term. The Monday following Thanksgiving in the United States is called Cyber Monday. The phrase first came into existence on November 28, 2005 via a press release launched by Shop.org and titled “‘Cyber Monday’” Quickly Becoming One of the Biggest Online Shopping Days of the Year”. Scott Silverman of Shop.org indicated the phrase was developed after looking at research from 2004 that indicated one of the biggest online shopping days of the year turned out to be the Monday following Thanksgiving. This cyber shopping term was further reinforced by the New York Times in late November, 2005. The Times story referenced millions of Americans returning to work after the holiday weekend who then used their workplace high-speed internet connections to buy what they desired.
Cyber Shopping
But now Cyber Shopping on Cyber Monday has gone global.
Cyber Monday shopping online is being promoted in the following countries Canada, the UK, Portugal, New Zealand, Germany, France and Chile among other countries. It has become an international marketing term. According to comScore, a digital tracking company, Cyber Monday sales have continued to track upward year over year since 2005 reaching the 1 billion dollar mark in 2010. It appears as though it is a natural evolution of carrying over holiday shopping that began on Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, through to Monday. With Cyber Monday sales so high it does mean that a substantial number of workers are shopping on company time. With the accessibility of high speed internet in the home, one might expect the number of cyber shoppers performing their shopping activities from work to decrease. It has been noted that over 50% of employers are now blocking employees from accessing certain websites. In 2011, it was reported that 7% of human resource managers had fired an employee for holiday shopping on the job. But “cyber shopping” continues to live on.
Since 2005, the media has been consistently touting Cyber Monday as a major internet event. This has branded it as the key internet shopping day of the year in the minds of consumers. Online businesses have reinforced this fact through their continued promotion of great money saving opportunities that can be achieved by shopping on this day. So this recent tradition which began in 2005 appears to be thriving not only in the United States, but around the world. As the brick and mortar stores look to Black Friday for their holiday shopping to begin, the online community looks to Cyber Monday for their holiday shopping to start.