Cyber Weekend Sales Rise 9% As Cyber Monday Fades Into Oblivion

Cyber Weekend e-commerce sales grew 9% in the US this year, up from 6% in 2023, according to data from Salesforce. The growth took place even as the average discount in the US shrank by 2% from last year, to 28%.

Cyber Weekend, the Saturday and Sunday sandwiched between Black Friday, which is the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season, and Cyber Monday, have become big online shopping days. US retailers garner about 20% of their annual sales during the holiday season.

"Despite the anticipation and careful planning that consumers put into Cyber Week, the discounts haven’t quite met expectations this year,” said Caila Schwartz, Director of Consumer Insights at Salesforce. “Nevertheless, shoppers still made a significant number of purchases thus far, demonstrating their resilience and eagerness to capitalize on the season’s deals."

One explanation for the relatively strong showing of Cyber Weekend is that it continues to pull forward demand from Cyber Monday, a day which was created to much fanfare by the National Retail Federation in 2005 when online shopping was first emerging, and has already become anachronistic.

As Axis notes, Cyber Monday was an attempt by e-commerce companies to piggyback on the Black Friday shopping frenzy, which at the time was overwhelmingly an in-person affair. The original idea was that after taking Thursday and Friday off work, plus the weekend, office drones would log into their work computers on Monday, where they could order goods over the newfangled Internet.

Of course, today everybody has the internet in their pocket and e-commerce is mostly conducted over phones rather than desktop computers and nobody waits until Monday to find good deals since the deep online discount start in many cases well before Thanksgiving, and continue for many days after the holiday is long gone.

As a result, since 2019 there has been more online shopping on Black Friday than on Cyber Monday.

So while Cyber Monday was originally a way for retailers to squeeze an extra day of sales out of the Thanksgiving Day long weekend, in this day and age of constant attention for eyeballs among the "always online" population,, with each year Cyber Monday's popularity continues to decline.