Consumers spent more than $880 million on online merchandise last year on Nov. 30 -- Cyber Monday, according to comScore.com, a company that measures the digital world. Cyber Monday was the second highest spending day of 2009. In addition, comScore.com reported that more than half of the dollars spent online at websites of U.S. retailers originated from work computers -- 52.7 percent. Dr. Kiseol Yang, assistant professor of merchandising at the University of North Texas, is available to discuss Cyber Monday, which this year falls on Nov. 29. Shop.org, part of the National Retail Federation, first coined the term in 2005 after research showed that 77 percent of online retailers reported a significant increase in sales the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2004. Yang will discuss behavior of shoppers who go online on Cyber Monday, including those who visit discount sites to sign up for different retailers' promotions instead of actually making a purchase, and the growing number of retailers who are using Facebook and Twitter to provide shoppers with instant access to their promotions. Bestcybermondaysales.com will tweet retailers' deals the entire day, beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 29, and Facebook.com/cybermondaysales will release new deals from selected popular retailers every 10 minutes on Cyber Monday. In addition, Yang will discuss applications for mobile phones as the next technology that shoppers may use on Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday shopping season. She recently surveyed 400 mobile services users about adoption of shopping applications, publishing the results in the June 2010 issues of "Journal of Consumer Marketing." Yang notes that several leading U.S. retailers, including Amazon, Ralph Lauren and Sephora beauty and cosmetics already have mobile applications. Sephora customers can input a product's barcode into their phones to read other customers' reviews, she says. Ralph Lauren customers only need to scan a code appearing in print advertisements, store windows and mailers to shop via their phones, and can sign up for mobile alerts about store openings and other events. Yang says her survey results indicated that shopping convenience -- saving time by not driving to stores, obtaining promotion information via cell phones and receiving customized product information -- is not the only factor influencing if Americans will use mobile shopping services. She discovered that Americans also want the technology to make shopping more entertaining and be user friendly. "In order for mobile sites and features without technological system difficulties to be available to consumers, it is crucial for retailers and marketers to design mobile sites and interfaces for both high-end and low-end devices," she says. Yang may be reached in her office at 940-369-8210 or by e-mail at Kiesol.Yang@unt.edu. |
