Cyber Monday Origins

by Doug Desjardins

Cyber Monday has become such a staple of retail-speak that it's hard to believe the term has been around only a few years. And while the origins of its sister term Black Friday are fairly well-known, the roots of Cyber Monday are not common knowledge.

Credit for coining the name goes to Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation (NRF) that first used the term in reference to the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2005. The group came up with the unofficial holiday after noticing a spike in online shopping the week after Thanksgiving. cyber-shopping

"You have to remember that shopping online was still something new at the start of this decade," said Stephen Baker, VP of industry analysis for research firm The NPD Group. "And back in 2001 and 2002, most homes weren't wired for broadband yet and people used computers at work to go online."

So shoppers still in a spending mood from Black Friday weekend began to search the Web for bargains the following Monday when they had access to broadband service at work. Tracking services that monitored Web activity began to notice the spike in traffic building each year and in 2005, Shop.org confirmed it when it polled online retailers and found that 77% reported an increase in activity on the Monday following Thanksgiving. And when it reported those findings, it dubbed the day Cyber Monday.

Of course, a lot has changed in four years, and the conditions that created Cyber Monday don't exist to the extent they did 10 years ago. "It's a made-up holiday to be sure and now that most people have broadband access at home, there's no reason to wait until Monday to shop online," said Baker.

And like Black Friday, which isn't the busiest shopping day of the holiday season, Cyber Monday isn't the busiest day for online shopping (in recent years, it's fallen in the first or second week of December). But that doesn't matter to online retailers and consumers who have bought into the notion that the online shopping season starts on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

According to the NRF, 84.6 million people shopped online on Cyber Monday in 2008 and 83.7% of retailers offered Cyber Monday promotions to attract shoppers. And 89% of consumers polled said they read or heard about Cyber Monday promotions in 2008 - up from 61% in 2007 - and 50% of online retailers reported it was their busiest day of the year. So even though a lot has changed since 2005, online retailers are still more than happy to promote a day when consumers feel compelled to shop online.