US Retailers Hope for a Big Cyber Monday

Retailers got a welcome Holiday gift on Black Friday, with retail sales actually rising 2 percent over last year. Despite the doom and gloom of economic prognosticators consumers lined the sidewalks in the wee-hours of the morning for "door-buster" deals.

Now retailers are hoping for more of the same online on this Cyber Monday. Most retail analyst are being conservative in their predictions following soft online sales numbers for November. However, many think that frustrated consumers that were unable to get the deals they were seeking in the traditional brick-and-mortar stores will turn to their computers today.

Online retailers are hitting their email subscribers with attractive incentives to encourage American consumers to spend the first day back to work--shopping.

BIGresearch, conducting a consumer survey with Shop.org, is predicting 86.4 million consumers will fill and check-out their online shopping carts today. This number is a significant increase over the 72 million that shopped online in 2007.

Most researchers like Forrester are predicting increases in online purchasing, much like what has been experienced every year since it began in the 1990s. However, this increase is not expected to be in the traditional double digit percentages. In 2007 this increase was 19 percent.

Traditional retail sales were down 4 percent in the 28 days leading up to Black Friday and online sales are traditionally 10 percent higher than offline sales (due to a much smaller base of sales). This should land total online holiday sales in the low teens this year--relatively flat.

Although Cyber Monday is a bit of a myth coined in 2005 by the National Retail Federation's Shop.org it is well marketed by retailers. The premise is that the Monday after Thanksgiving is the day that consumers take advantage of higher speed Internet connections at work to make their Christmas purchases. Interestingly enough the largest spike in online retail sales seems to fluctuate around the last day for standard delivery to reach most homes by Christmas, this year around December 18th.