Are you in a position for Cyber Monday?
Cyber Monday is a marketing term for the Monday after Black Friday, the Friday following Thanksgiving and one of the busiest shopping days in the United States. This year Cyber Monday falls on December 2, 2013. The term ‘Cyber Monday’ was created by marketing companies and made its debut on November 28, 2005 in a Shop.org press release entitled “Cyber Monday Quickly Becoming One of the Biggest Online Shopping Days of the Year”. According to the Shop.org/BizRate Research 2005 eHoliday Mood Study, “77-percent of online retailers said that their sales increased substantially on the Monday after Thanksgiving, a trend that is driving serious online discounts and promotions on Cyber Monday this year (2005)”.
Last year the Adobe Digital Index called for Cyber Monday to pass the $2 billion sales mark. The actual tally was $1.98 billion, just short. But the 2013 Online Shopping Forecast that Adobe recently released promises that the threshold will be crossed and then some this year, calling for an e-commerce tally of approximately $2.27 billion.
Adobe forecasts that only 2-percent of holiday purchases will be made via social media sites, but says that sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest don’t get credit for the role they play in purchase decisions.
Online retailers promote Cyber Monday using a variety of Internet marketing strategies, including smart phone advertisements. Comparison shoppers with smart phones connected to the Internet can easily find the hottest deals with the press of a button. Many online retailers have apps that allow smart phone users to look up products in their store. As a result, the buyer has an opportunity to explore other online stores for steeper bargains. In addition, this breeds fierce competition that grants online shoppers discounts not found in brick-and-mortar stores on Black Friday.
Many eCommerce stores use EDI technology to gain efficiencies in their overall supply chain operations, such as using the EDI 940 / 945 transaction sets to communicate electronically and efficiently with their 3rd party warehouses or the EDI 846 transaction set to get regular updates on inventory levels from their suppliers.
