Sales on Cyber Monday could top $1 billion, retail trackers say

NEW YORK -- Cyber Monday started as a gimmick to get people to shop at their desks on the first workday after Thanksgiving. But if you promote something enough, it can take on a life of its own.

This year, stores swamped customers with online ads and e-mail deals, and sales could top $1 billion, making it bigger than any single shopping day last year.

Online sales were already running 15 percent ahead of last year's by 3 p.m. Monday, with the biggest shopping hours of the day still to come, according to IBM's Coremetrics tracking service.

"The numbers are really strong," said the service's chief strategy officer, John Squire, who added that he expects Cyber Monday to be the biggest online shopping day of the season.

The Monday after Thanksgiving was dubbed Cyber Monday by the National Retail Federation trade group in 2005 to describe the unofficial kickoff to the online shopping season. The idea was that people returning to work after the long weekend would shop at their desks.

It never really was the busiest online shopping day of the year.

But like any good marketing angle, it spawned imitation. Nearly 90 percent of U.S. retailers offered some kind of Cyber Monday promotion this year, targeting shoppers who didn't want to venture out at 4 a.m. for those in-store deals. In 2007, 72 percent of retailers offered a Cyber Monday promotion.

"Retailers are doing everything they can to build up and extend the event aspect of it -- tweeting deals every hour, running Cyber Monday ads -- like it's such a big thing you can't miss out on," said Stacy Landreth Grau, associate professor of marketing at Texas Christian University's Neeley School of Business.

Rachel Bergman, general manager of e-mail marketing service Experian CheetahMail, said this year the company sent out several hundred million Cyber Monday promotional e-mails, 40 percent more than last year.

It has rarely been the biggest online shopping day of the holiday season, however -- last year it was No. 2 -- and this year, online deals have been stretched by retailers throughout the weekend.

Historically the biggest online shopping day of the year comes sometime in mid-December, when shoppers face deadlines for ordering to ensure delivery by Christmas Eve. Last year, it was Dec. 15, according to online research firm ComScore.

But this year, shoppers seem to be in the mood to spend more. On Thanksgiving Day, usually quiet for online shopping, Americans spent $407 million online, 28 percent more than last year. They spent nearly $650 million online the following day, up 9 percent.

Last year, Cyber Monday sales totaled $887 million. This year, $1 billion wouldn't be a surprise, analysts say.

New Yorker Joseph Gallo waited until Cyber Monday to buy the Blu-ray "Back to the Future" trilogy, on sale for $34.99, and separately a pair of headphones slashed to $45.69 from $130 from Amazon.com.

"I get the feeling of deals being better having watched Amazon all last week and today," Gallo said.

Many shoppers don't actually buy at work. They compare prices from their desks, then buy when they get home, said Graham Jones, vice president of merchant accounts for deal aggregator Pricegrabber.com. Peak activity on that site is usually 7 or 8 p.m.

Retailers like Best Buy, Target and others have extended their online deals through much of the weekend and through the week, but they were offering specific deals on Monday.

Target offered a Kodak Waterproof mini video camera, regularly $99.99, for $49.99, and it will offer more deals Tuesday and throughout the week. Walmart.com, which is pushing the event as "Cyber Week," promoted bikes for $39 and a 6.5-quart Dutch oven for $33.

Some shoppers who bypassed discounts over the weekend were rewarded on Monday. At Landsend.com, a girl's jacket was on sale for $39.99 on Sunday, a third off the retail price of $59.50. By Monday morning, the price was $35, and an extra savings came by way of free shipping.

Christy McClung, a student and quality control worker in central Oregon, said she bought a TV at BestBuy.com after she was out of town and missed Black Friday sales.

While she didn't find exactly the TV she wanted, she bought one because it was a good value, she said. "With the free shipping, it was a great deal."

Cyber Monday's share of online holiday spending has grown slightly over the past five years, from 2.5 percent in 2005 to 3 percent last year. That's partly because of shifts in the calendar that make the holiday shopping season longer or shorter, but also because "as consumers become more attuned to deals and discounts, Cyber Monday has become a more important event," said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst for ComScore.

Online spending is still a relatively small piece of the holiday pie, between 8 and 10 percent of total holiday sales.

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Associated Press writers Ellen Gibson and Dana Wollman in New York contributed to this report.