Cyber Rules Monday – And November

Retailers and their increasingly complex logistics networks are only as strong as their weakest links, and there’s no day like Cyber Monday to put just about every brand under a stress test of the highest order. However, with more and more customers staying home on Black Friday and spending their holiday shopping dollars online the following Monday instead, Cyber Monday is fast becoming a litmus test separating retailers that have established functional O2O strategies – and those that have not.

Amazon has cemented itself firmly in the former category, as reports continue to pour out of the eCommerce giant’s headquarters on its Cyber Monday efficiency. According to King5, NBC’s western Washington affiliate, some of Amazon’s distribution centers in the region were processing 500 orders per second. Stacey Keller, an Amazon spokeswoman, explained that the numbers are indicative of how seamless shopping online during Cyber Monday has become.

“We are already seeing people responding to great deals,” Keller told King5. “We’re making it easier than ever to shop online.”

Not every retailer has the resources to give customers an Amazon-like experience on Cyber Monday, though, and Target found itself in the crosshairs of a considerable amount of shopper ire when its website crashed under the weight of surging traffic Monday, Reuters reported. The problem appeared to be a site-wide one, with some customers unable to add new items to their carts and others flat out blocked from accessing Target’s homepage at all.

“Both traffic and order volumes are exceeding Target’s Thursday Black Friday event,” Jamie Bastian, spokeswoman for Target, told Reuters. “ … To help manage the volume, we have been metering traffic to the site.”

The experience might be a result of Target being unable to back up its promoted deals with the computing power necessary to handle the rush of digital shoppers. GeekWire reported that Target had just instituted a storewide 15-percent discount when the site crashed shortly after. Retailers might want to take this as a “Be careful what you wish for” type of lesson: If brands offer shoppers deals that could prove too good to pass up, they should be willing and able to deal with the demand.

Customers aren’t showing any signs of slowing their Cyber Monday activity, though. In fact, all signs point to the exact opposite. A preliminary report from IBM on Cyber Monday sales pointed to an approximate 18-percent increase over 2014’s numbers. Moreover, IBM identified several products that are particularly responsible for driving a high percentage of sales, including Nike shoes, Star Wars-branded action figures and flavor-of-the-month hoverboards. While those items drove sales, Nintendo 3DS handheld game systems, JBL speakers and Brother and EPSON printers were responsible for the fastest growing product trends of the day.

In a strong indication that holiday shopping is starting to bleed beyond the obsolete boundaries of defined shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, IBM found that sales on the Saturday and Sunday in between the two traditional benchmark days were up 25.5 percent over correlating 2014 figures. The average order value during the weekend climbed to $130.57, with smartphones accounting for 44 percent of all traffic – three times the numbers from tablet-based traffic.

Though Cyber Monday 2015 is barely in the books, some experts are already wondering if the industry has seen the last of the short-lived, unofficial retail holiday.

“It certainly is becoming more like Cyber November because people are getting a jump on their holiday shopping much earlier year over year,” Joanna Lambert, vice president of global consumer product and engineering at PayPal, told Bloomberg Business.