Black Friday marked the official start of the holiday shopping period, but today is the ceremonial kickoff for online retailers.
For the past several years, the Monday after Thanksgiving has been called "Cyber Monday." The term was coined after online retailers noticed a trend of people shopping on the Web that day--which is the first workday after Thanksgiving for most. Data show that a large percentage of online shopping takes place at work.
Early indications are that people are cutting back on online shopping this holiday season as the economy weakens. So online retailers plan major promotions to draw in their dollars.
"Cyber Monday is to online retailers what Black Friday is to brick-and-mortars--the kickoff to holiday shopping," said PayPal spokeswoman Amanda Pires. Though Cyber Monday gets the most attention, Pires said that the second Monday in December will actually be the busiest online holiday shopping day.
Cyber Monday will be more promotional than ever this year as retailers offer one-day sales and special offers to online shoppers, according to the National Retail Federation. The NRF projects that 84 percent of online retailers will have a special promotion today. Many offer free shipping.
"As shoppers focus on price this holiday season, online retailers will be extremely competitive to offer the very best deals," said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, in a prepared statement.
Early data released yesterday by market research firm comScore show that the online retailers have their work cut out for them. In the first 28 days of November, U.S. online shoppers spent about $10.4 billion--a 4 percent decline from the same period last year.
There was some good news for online retailers in comScore's data--Black Friday saw $534 million in online spending, up 1 percent from last year. Early results from bricks-and-mortar retailers also showed better-than-expected performances.
The comScore team predicts that online retail spending for November and December will be flat compared with last year. Online spending in October grew 1 percent.
That's a big departure from the double-digit online retail growth of the recent past. Almost half of the respondents to a comScore survey planned to cut back on holiday spending this year.
But for online retailers, the survey also showed a silver lining. About 40 percent said they planned to use the Internet to help cut costs by taking advantage of free shipping and no sales tax. Pires expects that budget-conscious shoppers will turn out today online.
"Even with the consumer credit crunch and gloomy economy, we're still predicting consumers to be shopping online this year," Pires said.
Bill Freehling: 540/374-5405
Email: bfreehling@freelancestar.com
The percentage of credit-card accounts that were more than 60 days late remained modest in the Fredericksburg area as of the end of June, but the tallies were higher than the year before. Because many purchases on Cyber Monday are made with credit cards, the data is one indicator of the financial health of the possible shoppers. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently started publishing county-by-county credit-card and mortgage delinquency rates. Go to fredericksburg.com/blogs/bizbrowser for a link to the interactive map. Click "New York Fed" in the "Blog Roll" section. The following data show the percentage of credit-card accounts that were more than 60 days past due as of the end of June for each locality. Percentage-point differences from the year before are in parentheses. Caroline: 1.82 percent (+0.03 percentage points) Culpeper: 1.86 percent (+0.22 percentage points) Fauquier: 1.76 percent (+0.50 percentage points) Fredericksburg: 2.27 percent (+1.12 percentage points) King George: 2.18 percent (+0.52 percentage points) Louisa: 2.14 percent (+0.27 percentage points) Orange: 1.73 percent (+0.70 percentage points) Spotsylvania: 2.54 percent (+0.94 percentage points) Stafford: 1.47 percent (+0.21 percentage points) Westmoreland: 2.0 percent (+0.65 percentage points) A positive is that though delinquency rates were higher from June 2007, they were lower in eight of the 10 localities compared with the end of March 2008--Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania were the two exceptions. --Bill Freehling |