RAPAPORT... Shoppers in the United States have long been accustomed to a marriage of Thanksgiving and Christmas as one big gifting season ever since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "Franksgiving" initiatives were codified into law in 1941 by Congress.
Roosevelt had intended to extend the amount of shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas to alleviate weak consumer confidence during the waning years of the Great Depression by officially placing Thanksgiving at the fourth Thursday of the month rather than on the final Thursday. As the shopping season caught-on with consumers the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, became known as the day retailers turned a profit with a spike in sales.
In 2005 though, the new-wave incarnation of Black Friday emerged, coined by online retailers as Cyber Monday -- which is the first full-work day following the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. In the same way Black Friday was invented by New Deal pragmatism, Cyber Monday was invented by Internet marketers hoping to capture attention from office workers (with fast connectivity) and a desire to buy online while the boss isn't looking.
So far though, online sales for Cyber Monday have not come in at No.1. Mastercard is already predicting the busiest day to be Monday, December 10, 2007. The busiest online shopping days are usually a Monday or Tuesday before Christmas -- or dates coinciding with roughly the time it would take a UPS ground parcel to arrive before Christmas Eve.
Now in its third year, the e-commerce push continued to increase Cyber Monday site impressions on November 26. Internet company Akamai reported that its metrics for 300 monitored retail sites yielded 4.6 million visitors per second, making it the single largest day of Internet retail traffic in 3 years. The National Retail Federation (NRF) reported a threefold increase from 2006 in traffic to its cybermonday.com site, which offered advertising and promotions for retailers, though NRF really didn't promote the website until this year.
But website traffic aside, like foot traffic to the malls, high numbers of visitors don't always lead to a dramatic rise in sales, especially for expensive purchases such as diamond jewelry. The Internet does however diminish geographic location of both retailer and shopper leveling the playing field on Cyber Monday, and other days in December, across retail websites and aggregator product websites.
For Cyber Monday in particular, free shipping for orders placed that day was commonplace for many sellers, but some retailers upped the ante with one-day-only sales specials, or promotions such as free earrings with a minimum purchase. Others offered steep discounts -- which Blue Nile did for the day as long as one bought diamonds through PayPal.
The NRF website claimed 72 percent of online retailers offered Cyber Monday incentives and specials, up from 43 percent in 2006. Monday's online sales were not available as of press time, but are expected tomorrow.
As shoppers logged-on during Cyber Monday though, numerous websites failed to deliver due to heavy traffic. Yahoo Merchant Services, which carries numerous small jewelers, had server issues for four hours as its shopping cart application failed.
Wal-Mart, which had suffered server issues on Black Friday, and Ice.com both posted prominent diamond and jewelry specials for Cyber Monday.
Wal-Mart offered 150 online specials as part of its five day post-Thanksgiving push. The retailer reported it sold out of $488 (1tcw, I, I3,) diamond earrings on Monday, but the product was restocked by Tuesday.
Ice.com's CEO Shmuel Gniwisch, an early Cyber Monday adopter, observed a 70 percent increase in traffic from 2006, converting impressions to post an 82 percent rise in sales. Ice.com reported an impressive jump in average orders to $233 from about $200 a year ago.
What We Found...
For a limited time on Monday afternoon we (the Rapaport News team) hit-up the websites of Big Box retailers, online diamond specialists, and product aggregators for diamond and jewelry specials. Afterall...this is what Cyber Monday is all about.
While our effort was not scientific it was simply as common as anyone's attempt from their office should they be searching for diamonds. We all used high speed connections...but our news manager (Jeff) is a brutal online shopper and doesn't stand for a poor experience of any kind, so he was quickest to abandon a website that didn't satisfy quench for diamonds.
On the high level view: Shop.org's cybermonday.com website, which really operated as an aggregator for NRF members, displayed numerous jewelry brand names and specials during the day. Most were dominated by QVC, ShopNBC, Ice.com, Overstock.com, HSN, Blue Nile, eLuxury.com, and Jewelrytelevision.com. The retailers were able to display ad-boxes with specials, and could additionally list special offers below the fold (such as a sale on 1 carat diamond ring, or free shipping.) This is where Blue Nile featured its discount for buyers who chose to use PayPal. On No.1 search engine Google, those diamond retailers who purchased sponsored links during the afternoon included: Blue Nile, NetCarats.com, Helzberg Diamonds, Abazias, Yehuda.com, overnightdiamonds.com, and NYdiamondtraders.com. Despite media reports showing that heavy traffic impacted some retail websites on Cyber Monday, this was not the case for us. The bigger issues were related to poor website design and/or no prominent diamond offerings.
Here were some highlights of what we found during the afternoon hours of November 26.
- While Blue Nile announced it offered a 20 percent discount on items bought through PayPal, the homepage did not prominently display this message -- nor did it state any Cyber Monday specials as it had on cybermonday.com.
- The Zales website displayed "front and center" its sponsorship of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting ceremony, and a website-wide sale of up to 70 percent off jewelry.
- Amazon.com's site proved to be un-friendly, at least in our opinion, for finding diamonds and jewelry. Navigation was clunky and after getting caught in a loop in the men's black gemstone section... we finally gave up and moved to another website.
- Abazias.com offered no prominent Cyber Monday deals.
- Kay Jewelers featured some general promotions, but nothing special for the day.
- Shenoa Diamonds didn't display Cyber Monday promotions -- but it did have one interesting feature. Upon hitting the website, a live chat box appeared asking us if we needed help.
- Macy's offered free shipping with a $75 purchase and did not prominently feature jewelry in the afternoon hours.
- Sears, which lost connectivity due to saturation on Thanksgiving Day, proved fine for us on Monday afternoon, and appeared to have many Cyber Monday promotions including diamond jewelry.
- Wal-Mart's website, much to our surprise, required a Flash plug-in to view anything at all... We moved on quickly though, because we had Flash installed already and it wasn't our game plan to solve Wal-Mart usability issues while shopping.
- Nordstroms had no prominent Cyber Monday offerings.
- Saks offered free shipping this one day and featured jewelry.
- Overstock.com offered 10 percent off all jewelry on the website, which included some 70 pages of diamond jewelry offerings, including a +64 total-carat-weight diamond necklace for $99,999.99 with a one day discount of $10,000.
- Membership-only wholesalers BJ's and Costco displayed diamond jewelry prominently on their homepages.
- Kohl's offered free shipping, but the website did not play very nice with our browsers.
- Bloomingdales was pushing women's boots...and that appeared to be it.
- Dillard's was prominently featuring a special on Majorca pearls.
- Neiman Marcus offered "selective free shipping," and featured Majorca pearls on their homepage. Once we passed through the homepage we were taken to a full screen page of mini-photographs (which were supposed to look like products, we guessed,) and everything was colored green. When clicking a photograph of jewelry though, the site kept sending us to furs.
A cursory glance at keywords for the day according to sites like Google Trends and Wordtracker, indicate web surfers were more interested in finding general bargains for the day with popular searches by Big Box store name or “Cyber Monday deals.” Specific product categories (such as diamonds or jewelry) did not appear in top keyword results.
While it would be hasty to conclude the success of Cyber Monday without sales figures, which have yet to be released, self-reporting from retailers so far indicates that with the right promotions in place, the hype fueled a healthier amount of sales than one year ago.
If the short history of Cyber Monday is to serve as any guide, based upon prior years, Cyber Monday is not likely to go down as the No.1 online spending day heading into Christmas for the top (perhaps 10) days are yet to come.
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