Echo Chamber
It’s not always easy to separate myth from actual statistics. It only took a few days last year for the term “Cyber Monday” to be repeated all over the Internet and in media “news” stories once it appeared for the first time in a Shop.org pre-Thanksgiving press release. This year more Cyber Monday stories have permeated the media. There’s even a Web site called cybermonday.com (hosted by Shop.org, naturally) that serves as a portal for a healthy list of online merchants.
The idea that the first Monday after Thanksgiving is the online version of the brick-and-mortar “Black Friday” turns out to be statistically invalid, but the hype may help push the statistics closer to reality. This year it appears that the busiest online shopping day will have occurred two weeks after Cyber Monday, just like last year, when the busiest online sales date was Dec. 12, according to ComScore Networks. This year’s busiest online sales day? Not yet clear, but ComScore Networks predicts it will be that day in December when online sales finally peak at $700 million.
Cyber Monday might seem more like echoes than real sound, but maybe it will take on a life of its own, a kind of Shop.org Frankenstein’s monster. A recent (Nov. 30, 2006) Business Week article titled “Cyber Monday Hype Pays Off” quotes Pinny Gniwisch, executive VP of ice.com: “The truth of the matter is not about whether Cyber Monday is all it’s cracked up to be, but rather about who was able to use the hype to generate more sales.”