Cyber Monday Proves Busy Shopping Day

If traffic on CyberMonday.com is any indication, the holiday cyber shopping season is off to a running start. Tracked visits to the site, which offers promotions and special deals from online retailers, increased three-fold over last year. By 1 pm EST on Monday, the site had seen more than 1 million visitors.

“Cyber Monday” is a term coined by Shop.org, after online retailers began noticing a trend of people shopping online on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Shop.org Executive Director Scott Silverman commented, “Online retailers stepped up their promotions of Cyber Monday this year, and millions of consumers responded.”

Approximately 72 million consumers were expected to shop online on Cyber Monday, 54.5 percent of them from work, provided they had internet access at the jobsite, according to Shop.org. A study conducted by BizRate.com found that 72.2 percent of online retailers out of 116 surveyed were planning a special promotion for the day, up substantially from 42.7 percent two years ago.

According to Akamai’s Net Usage Index for Retail, traffic to U.S. e-commerce sites was very high between noon and 4 pm EST, peaking just before 2 pm with 2.95 million visitors per minute. Another point of high traffic was registered around 8 pm.