Cyber Monday is a great online shopping opportunity for Walmart, so the retailer decided to give its clients a better shopping experience by moving it to a different day of the week.
Walmart, the biggest vendor by revenue in the world, announced that it starts Cyber Monday on the Sunday following Thanksgiving. Until 2015, Walmart's online deals started on the first Monday after Thanksgiving. Traditionally, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November.
In 2014, Walmart enticed its customers with a couple of "teaser" deals on Sunday, but this year its clients will get every Cyber Monday promotion one day earlier. It debuts on Sunday, Nov. 29, at 8 p.m. EST. Due to the time-zone difference of five hours, the offer begins in Europe on Monday, Nov. 30, at 01:00 a.m. The Bentonville-based retailer announced 2,000 Cyber Monday online-exclusive deals, four times as many as last year's 500 special offers.
The United States first started with Cyber Monday deals about 10 years ago when the newly implemented broadband Internet access allowed users to quickly buy stuff online. Fernando Madeira, chief executive of Walmart, made it clear that today Internet access is so common that it makes it unreasonable to limit the event to a weekday only.
"The customers have changed but Cyber Monday hasn't changed with them," Madeira declared, as cited by Reuters. "Now everyone has Internet."
The initiative demonstrates that Walmart joins the army of retailers who see potential in extending the single-day big discount events. For example, a number of companies offer hard-to-resist deals for Black Friday in the weeks before the actual event. Black Friday, the Friday immediately after Thanksgiving, proved to be one of the busiest shopping times of the year.
Starting earlier, the Cyber Monday online shopping makes sense, as the online market wars with bigger names, such as Amazon, intensifies. Amazon has a solid foothold in the in e-commerce niche and Walmart has a lot of work to do in order to lure Amazon loyalists.
The estimated sales for Cyber Monday are $3 billion in the U.S. alone. According to calculations done by Adobe, the revenues will go up by 12 percent. If Adobe's numbers are correct, Cyber Monday will stay ahead of the curve in terms of online revenue, followed closely by Black Friday sales that could reach as high as $2.7 billion.
