Cyber Monday Sales Up 15% This Year

While Black Friday has long signified the official beginning of the Holiday shopping season, Cyber Monday—a coin termed by Shop.org three years ago—has become an integral part of retailers' success as well. The first Monday after Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday marks the beginning of the online shopping season as consumers return to work and search the Internet for better deals than they saw in the brick-and-mortar stores.

Online traffic has increased each of the last three Cyber Mondays as more and more retailers (your competition) entice web shoppers with web-only discounts, free shipping, and other hot deals not offered in stores.

2007 Cyber Monday

If you haven't taken your store online yet, here's a look at what you missed out on Monday:

• A Shop.org survey conducted by BIGresearch found that 72M people planned to shop online on Cyber Monday
• According to the Hitwise Retail 100 Index, traffic rose 26% over 2006
• ShopperTrak RCT reports sales for Friday and Saturday combined increased 7.2% from 2006 with sales totaling $16.4B
• More than 200 retailing websites tracked by Akamai were drawing 4.6M visitors per minute
• According to comScore, Cyber Monday sales jumped 15% from 2006

And it's not just Cyber Monday that showed an increase. According to Nielsen Online, online shopping on Black Friday weekend was up 10% over 2006. Consumers spent $272M on Thanksgiving Day and $531M on Black Friday, which is up 22% from last year.

Integrated Ecommerce Solutions

The good news: it's easier than ever to take your retail store online. Many of today's better retail point of sale systems are seamlessly integrated to their own ecommerce stores which makes it very simple to open and maintain an online store. With an integrated ecommerce solution, you can process web orders using the same retail software you run your business with. An integrated ecommerce solution can save you both time and money by eliminating the effort and expense of maintaining inventory in multiple systems.

Even if you don't know a "www" from an "html," you can still operate a profitable ecommerce business. Today's out-of-the-box ecommerce solutions allow you to easily change the web template's colors, and you can add text and graphics to each page using a simple WYSIWYG editor.

If you are using an ecommerce solution that's integrated with your retail point of sale system, you can quickly identify items in your retail software that you want to sell online. Because item numbers, prices, available quantities, etc. come directly from your retail point of sale system, you can cut down on set up time and focus on what really matters: reaching a whole new world of online shoppers.

If your store is not online, you're missing out on an estimated $174.5B industry according to National Retail Federation (NRF) projections. Year round—and particularly during the holiday shopping season—more and more consumers are foregoing the crowded malls and staying home to do their shopping. Your competition is reaching new customers all over the world with their online stores. Isn't it about time you got one too?