Black Friday tops Cyber Monday

The history of black Friday dates back to the 1960’s to kick off the Christmas shopping season. The tem “black” refers to stores moving from the “red” to the “black,” back when accounting records were kept by hand, and the red ink indicated a loss, and the black a profit. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving where shoppers will skip the left over Thanksgiving scraps to stand in line waiting for the opening of their favorite stores. Retailers advertise numerous doorbuster deals, even if this means the store will take a loss on the given product, just to entice shoppers to come to their stores. There have been many reports of customers and employees of the stores getting trampled by the herd of people flooding the stores. You may find great deals on Black Friday, but at what cost? Nowadays the online market has taken part in a sale of their own, an online sale known as Cyber Monday. This virtual holiday became globally known as Cyber Monday in 2005. Though the history of Cyber Monday is relatively short, it is becoming more and more popular in this new virtual age. Shoppers can now do their holiday shopping in the comfort of their own homes avoiding the long lines, the crowds, and the possibility of being trampled.

With Cyber Monday sales soaring up seventeen percent form the previous year to a whopping 1.64 billion dollars the popularity of mobile devices and applications is on the rise and some applications performing better than others. Some consumers are even taking their mobile devices and smart phones to stores with them and looking to see if they can find a better deal online. Mashable.com states that payments through mobile devices are up by one hundred and ninety percent as opposed to the same day last year. IBM also conducted a study that concludes that people shopping through mobile devices and phones had increased by seventy percent. According to CNN mobile sites and applications were taking roughly eighteen more seconds to load, roughly doubling the load time of mobile sites. This extended load time for mobile sites and applications can be detrimental to sales. According to Mark Rudger, a mobile and web performance manager at Keynote, states that “customers typically don't like to wait more than three seconds for a website to load, and they'll switch to a competitor's site if they grow impatient”. Customers are growing more and more impatient and an inability to keep a mobile application or website running smoothly can cost a company precious sales dollar during this holiday sales season. Dell, Ebay, and Newegg’s mobile applications were some of these years’ slow performers. Among the top performers were Amazon.com, Best Buy, and Barnes N Noble. However the worst of the worst had to be Foot Lookers website which crashed for roughly a 40 minute window. It would be asinine to not think of mobile shopping for Cyber Monday and Black Friday to become even more popular in the coming years. Failing to streamline mobile apps and websites can cost companies big dollars in lost revenue during these crucial retailing holidays.
With the ever growing innovations in technology one can assume that once the kinks are worked out on mobile and online shopping, Cyber Monday will eventually become significantly more popular than Black Friday.

Cited:

Bentley, John. "DisplayLocation();." History of Cyber Monday. Superpages.com, Nov. 2012. Web. 28 Nov. 2012. <http://www.superpages.com/supertips/history-of-cyber-monday.html>.

Redford, Roger. "Black Friday History." The History of Black Friday. Blackfriday.com, Nov. 2012. Web. 28 Nov. 2012. <http://blackfriday.com/pages/black-friday-history>.

Tuttle, Brad. "Cyber Monday Was a Monster — But We Still Love Shopping in Stores." Time. Word Press, 28 2012. Web. 28 Nov 2012. <http://business.time.com/2012/11/28/cyber-monday-was-a-monster-but-we-still-love-shopping-in-stores/>.