Commentary

Cyber Monday Taking A Backseat To Overall Online Sales

Consumer behavior continues to change, especially during the end-of-year holidays. Cyber Monday is declining in importance as a higher percentage of purchases shift to online.

Yahoo Small Business has released an overview of its holiday sales data based on its e-commerce merchants, which suggests that the spike that companies have come to expect on Cyber Monday continues to fall. And it has for the past few years. 

“While Cyber Monday is not the model it used to be, it’s still the highest day of sales for small business merchants,” says Phil Grier, a commerce engineer at Yahoo Small Business, who ran a small business with his wife for about 10 years.

In fact, Yahoo Small Business reported that in 2017, Cyber Monday sales rose 26% compared with Black Friday. In 2018, Cyber Monday sales rose 17% higher than on Black Friday, and in 2019 Cyber Monday sales rose 7% higher than on Black Friday.

Despite the decline, business is good. Money generated via ecommerce continues to rise, Grier said.

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Yahoo’s merchants are not the only ones to see a shift. Earlier this month, Adobe Analytics also reported that Black Friday has changed from a one-day sale to an extended weekend sale, perhaps several weeks long.

And then there is the CNN and SurveyMonkey Small Business Confidence Survey, which compares Republican vs. Democrat small business owners. Some 60% of Republican small business owners say current conditions for their business are good -- twice as many as the 34% among Democratic small business owners, according to the report.

Regardless of their political affiliation, merchants and consumers are pushing the change. One reason that behavior continues to change is that days like Amazon Prime train consumers to be ready for sales all the time, he said.

“Rather than being hyper-focused on one day or one week, people are doing their shopping early,” Grier said. 

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