Cyber Monday: What is all the hype about?

In the UK and across the world, online retailers have one incredibly important date circled in their calendars: Cyber Monday…

What is Cyber Monday?

Whilst boxing day sales were once the big thing in UK retail to look forward to each year, an increasing number of retailers now follow trends from across the pond like Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, which have, so far, proved to be increasingly popular with each passing year.

Cyber Monday is a date which is marketed by online retailers as an occasion to get online and make purchases on their often heavily discounted goods and services.

Typically, Cyber Monday promotions are only available online, hence the name.  As a result, there are often many more deals from small and medium businesses than on Black Friday, which is the mainstay of some of the largest online retailers around.

As of 2014, UK Cyber Monday sales went through the roof, with a huge number of online retailers throughout the country running Cyber Monday promotions and breaking all of their previous sales records as consumers hit the online high-street to grab handfuls of online bargains.

When does Cyber Monday take place?

Cyber Monday occurs on the first Monday following the US thanksgiving holiday (Which itself falls on the fourth Thursday in November).

Whilst this special retail occasion has been around in the US since 2005, the UK has been adopting Cyber Monday since 2009, with a number of other countries around the world, like Germany, Sweden and Australia following suit.

How did Cyber Monday come into being?

Like so many online phenomena, Cyber Monday was the result of retailers reacting to analysis of sales figures that indicated a predictable trend among US shoppers: It just so happened that the busiest shopping time of the year for online retailers there fell right after the Thanksgiving weekend: Armed with this knowledge, the new occasion was named and promoted by the most savvy online retailers in the US.  As the popularity of the occasion grew, Cyber Monday fulfilled its potential as a worldwide phenomenon, which looks set to only grow in popularity as further countries follow the US lead (Despite the fact that US Thanksgiving is not typically observed in most of these nations).

The combination of heavily slashed prices, media hype and the convenience of shopping online before the Christmas holidays looks to be a winning formula for retailers looking to capitalise on the popularity of Cyber Monday.

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About Graham Lyons

Graham is the SEO and Social Media Marketing Manager at Cozy Digital and the editor of the Cozy Digital Blog as well as contributing content for most of our social outlets like Facebook, Twitter and G+. Graham has been working in, and writing for the SEO / SMM industry since 2001 and is still as dedicated and passionate today as he was when he opened his first Website Design, Ecommerce and SEO company in 2004. You can connect with Graham and Cozy Digital via the social media links below:

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