"Cyber Monday" Online Shopping Fails to Live Up to Hype

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on November 28, 2006 - 2:21pm.

San Francisco - "Cyber Monday," a term coined a year ago by the National Retail Foundation to refer to online shopping done on the first day back to work after Thanksgiving, appears this year to not have lived up to hype pushed by retailers and the media alike.

"We didn't see any unusual (traffic) on the site," Craig Berman, an Amazon.com spokesman, told CNET News.com, adding that the company's biggest day last year was Dec. 12. In 2005, Akamai Technologies tracked 3.1 million visitors per minute to retail sites on Cyber Monday, the San Jose Mercury News reported, a figure that had risen 14% to 3.5 million by day's end yesterday.

"We never said that Cyber Monday was the busiest day of the year," Scott Krugman, a spokesman for the National Retail Foundation, told News.com. "The press picked that up and wrote what they wanted." A larger bump in retail traffic was likely seen on Black Friday, the more traditional day-after-Thanksgiving shopping rush for retail stores.

Online retailers including Amazon.com, WalMart.com and Macys.com all experienced an influx of Web traffic on Friday that either slowed or temporarily disabled their sites. ComScore Networks data showed that Black Friday Internet shopping reached $430 million this year, a 42% increase from 2005.

Related Links:
http://tinyurl.com/y9j87s (CNET)
http://tinyurl.com/ygsvws (San Jose Mercury News)