Cyber Monday Hype Pays Off

Posted by: Rob Hof on November 30, 2006

A lot of stories have been explaining that Cyber Monday, supposedly the kickoff of the holiday shopping season online, isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, I had written about this a year ago, shortly after the notion was launched by Shop.org, a unit of the National Retail Federation, as a way to match the Black Friday tradition.

One online retailer, however, turned the hype to its advantage. Pinny Gniwisch, founder and executive VP of Web jeweler Ice.com, explains in an email to me:

With all the talk about Cyber Monday, Ice.com used heavyweight search engines like Google and Yahoo to help drive traffic to our unique Cyber Monday page. Ice.com was the only retailer who bought keywords related to Cyber Monday and Black Monday, which drove an excess of 12,000 clicks, generating an above average conversion rate on those words and terms. We generated over $50,000 of sales from those keywords.

The truth of the matter is not about whether Cyber Monday is all it’s cracked up to be, but rather about who was able to use the hype to generate more sales.

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Reader Comments

Jesse Ciccone

December 1, 2006 09:21 AM

Bravo to Ice.com! As the PR firm for ATG (they make the software that powers the eCommerce Web sites of companies like Best Buy, Neiman Marcus, Target and many more), we used the 'myth of Cyber Monday' pitch to great effect in recent weeks. While I still believe the numbers this year will once again prove (y)our point about the day being more hype than reality, this was still a brilliant move by Ice.com.

For what it's worth, ATG's findings are that that Cyber Monday is only the 9th largest online shopping day of the year and that sales tend to increase closer to the holiday (and, more importantly, a given retailers shipping deadlines) b/c of last minute shoppers taking advantage of the convenience of online buying and shipping.

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