Created by Shop.org, the “holiday” is considered to be the first official online shopping day. Just like Black Monday where retailers offer sometimes ridiculous deals to lure shoppers in, on Cyber Monday online stores offer incredible discounts and savings to those buying items that day.
The day brought in over $700 million in sales, up from $608 million in 2006 and $485 million in 2005. Despite it being ranked as only the 12th most popular online shopping day (according to Business Week’s Robert Hof), retailers expect their numbers to continue to rise as the day becomes more known.
Although Cyber Monday happened almost perfectly well, there was at least one glitch with the online shopping. Yahoo Merchant Solutions’ shopping cart software crashed on Cyber Monday, leading to a dramatic loss of revenue for over 10,000 merchants using the Yahoo software.
Beginning at 8:31am (PST) a message on the Yahoo Merchant Solutions System Status page characterized the problem as an “Error Message During Checkout.” As the day went on, this messaged continued for many people trying to checkout. Nothing else was updated until 5:12pm (PST), saying that Yahoo was investigating the issue. The system wasn’t fully repaired and running until 11:00pm (PST). Yahoo’s only explanation of the mess up was that they had experienced “technical glitches.”
