A good Black Friday for e-tail as Amazon reveals Cyber Monday deals

E-tailers give thanks

A great illustration of how globalised our economy has become is Black Friday - a specifically US phenomenon that sees a lot of price promotions on offer the day after Thanksgiving. Thanks to US e-tail giants like Amazon, we now get Black Friday deals over here, and maybe it will soon rival Boxing Day for the compulsive retail frenzy of the year.

Online data tracker comScore has revealed its figures for Black Friday (the name has come to mean that day retailers move into the black - i.e. become profitable after ten months of trading at a loss) e-tail traffic, and they reveal a nine percent increase in e-tail spend over last year.

But there was an even bigger jump in spending on Thanksgiving itself (when bricks-and-mortar retailers are presumably closed) and the whole of November so far.

"Although Black Friday is known for the flurry of activity occurring in brick-and-mortar retail stores, online shopping is increasingly becoming the refuge of those preferring to avoid the crowds and long lines," said comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni.

"The $648 million in online spending this Black Friday represents the heaviest online spending day of the season-to-date and a solid increase over last year's Black Friday. Interestingly, we are also seeing consumers beginning to buy online in a more meaningful way on Thanksgiving Day, which has historically seen low buying activity."

*Corresponding days based on corresponding shopping days
(November 2 thru November 27, 2009)

Of the four e-tailers that got more than four million unique visitors in the US on Black Friday, Amazon fared the best compared to last year with an increase of 25 percent. A big reason for this could be the high-profile price promotions it even exported over here.

Presumably buoyed by this success, Amazon has announced a bunch more deals for today - Cyber Monday. This term was coined relatively recently to describe the tendency for US consumers to go online in order to complete any shopping they were too hungover to do on Black Friday and to look for deals. The online spend is generally a lot higher than on Black Friday.

Here are some selected US offers, we're unaware of a corresponding promotion in the UK:

• VIZIO 47-Inch 1080p LCD HDTV: $599 (list price: $998)
• Panasonic S50 Camcorder: $149 (list price: $229)
• Nokia N8 Touchscreen Phone: $429 (list price: $549)
• BlackBerry phones from all carriers starting at $.01 at AmazonWireless (with a new contract, includes waived activation fee)
• TomTom XXL 5-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator: $89.99 (list price: $229)
• Fallout: New Vegas: $39.99 (list price: $59.99)