Lots of newscasts talked about “Cyber Monday”, supposedly the ecommerce equivalent to brick & mortar stores “Black Friday”. The latter is the day after the U.S. Thanskgiving holiday when shoppers line up in the pre-dawn hours to take advantage of sales that last a few hours. Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year, and is so named because it is the day when some retailers finally make up for losses incurred in the first ten months of the year and get to use “black ink” on their financials.
The origin of Cyber Monday is a bit more suspect. It sprang into the collective awareness within the last week or so, and according to BusinessWeek.com it may have been a marketing gimmick created by Shop.com to capitalize on press coverage of Black Friday.
While the origin of Cyber Monday may be suspect, it certainly looks like the effect is real. In Cyber Monday Traffic Jumps, RedHerring.com reports that ecommerce traffic was up 35% on Monday. Overstock.com reported the biggest traffic day in the company’s history.
What’s the truth in all this? I think the Monday after Thanksgiving probably IS one of the biggest online shopping days. For whatever reason, Monday has always been the biggest day of the week for mail order firms; in my pre-Internet catalog days, our biggest call center staffing day was the Monday after Thanksgiving. (I guess that would be Pre-Cyber Monday, or perhaps Mail Order Monday.) From my own direct observation of ecommerce sites I’m involved with, Monday appears to have been the biggest traffic day of the year. So, while I hate to be manipulated to adopt invented terminology, I’ll concede that Cyber Monday is for real. 
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