Max Riffner

The Parlor

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Cyber Monday?

Alright, alright, everyone knows what Black Friday is right? The day after Thanksgiving, supposedly the biggest shopping day of the year? The day retailers all over the nation try to make up for soft sales by promotion after promotion on top of a big ol’ slice of promotion to get into the black (which is because they seem to always aggressively set their sales marks too high, but that is another post altogether)?

In e-commerce, it has been known for many years that the Monday after Thanksgiving is bountiful for sales, but apparently the media just found out about this and have given it a clever name: Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday sounds like a New Order tribute band where all the music is made with a combination of a Casio and the standard alert beeps on a Mac Classic.

So why is Monday big for e-commerce? People are not at their computers on Friday (duh). That’s it. No rocket science. No spin. Monday, they come into the office and open their email to a plethora of online offers. And most places offer their lowest prices online. We tried a Black Friday promotion once about three years ago. I don’t remember the results, but we haven’t done it since.

However, the entire week after Thanksgiving has been huge for us at the day job. We’ll see our best sales this week, more than likely. We all sit and watch the stats all day, taking bets on which day will be the highest. My guess is it will be Wednesday. This also means stress time if they want a last minute promotion, so it may be light on content here for the week.

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