The most exciting season for e-commerce is upon us, holiday shopping. This the time where families get together to be grateful for the things that have happened in their lives in the past yeat. But because of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it is also the time where people buy all the products they wanted to before, but on a lower price.

Cyber Monday is a term that was created a little over 10 years ago, but in the mind of many, it has been here for a longer time. It wasn’t long ago that people would gather around on the streets and line up in front of stores waiting for them to open so they could get the best deals of the year. The first big commerce holiday, Back Friday, on the other hand, was created in the 1960s in Philadelphia as a way to describe the crowds of people that were on the city streets on the day after Thanksgiving.

Black Friday can in some way be considered more important than Thanksgiving. Its “tradition” has transcended the cultural attachment to it in a way that even countries that don’t celebrate the holiday still have the Black Friday deals. It’s a great way to capitalize on the American way of life for non-Americans. It is also a great excuse for marketers and sellers to entice people to purchase items that they might not have thought about buying if they were full price.

However, its sister holiday Cyber Monday is the one that really takes the cake. The term was created in 2005 after a study noticed that a group of people, even way back when the internet wasn’t as fast as it is today, preferred waiting on the comfort of their houses for online deals instead lining up for stores at 3 a.m. The National Retail Federation (NRF) wanted to capitalize on the money that was being made by physical stores by pushing online sales more and that was how Cyber Monday was created. The name was made to be because back then the internet was called the cyberspace.  

In 2017 Cyber Monday brought a total of $6.59 billion for the American market, a record never before seen in the US with an increase of 16.8% against what was spent on 2016. It comes without saying that the marketing strategies chosen for this day have to be the best ones. In the beginning, there was little that marketers could do to promote their sales. Yes, online advertising was a thing but it wasn’t as booming as it is today, we didn’t have as many users online and so depending on the internet. Now a brand can advertise their discounts days before Cyber Monday. They can get their customers hyped about the products they might buy and some websites even let them purchase the product on sale before, to be delivered on Cyber Monday. The options are endless, the company just needs to know what best approach is best for them.

That might be a display ad, a search ad or even social ads. The brand might even just want to announce it on social media without having to use any paid promotion. There isn’t a wrong way of marketing your brand during this time. The point is, as an e-commerce, you should advertise. For a lot of online companies, Cyber Monday is their biggest event, it has been reported to even be the cause of 80% of sales year round.

Cyber Monday can also be intimidating for some companies since they are literally competing with other brands for the consumer’s attention now more than ever. But if you’re an online business you should embrace the chaos that is Black Friday and Cyber Monday, because only good things can come out of it.