Cyber Monday: Hype or Heaven?

For us, anyway, it was heaven. More on that in a sec.

It was hard to miss all the media hype over yesterday's expected online shopping frenzy. Dubbed "Cyber Monday," it was billed as the online equivalent of "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving. Despite the omnipresent media buzz, several major retailers were caught unprepared. The National Retail Federation reported that sites like Wal-Mart and Macy's were down for a good deal of Friday, although they were up and running Monday (details here, via the LA Daily News).

Additionally, the NRF's own shopping site, cybermonday.com, crashed and was inaccessable much of the day yesterday. More at the SEW forums, here. (Personally, I find this hilarious - the very organization promoting Cyber Monday was unprepared for traffic to its own much-hyped shopping site?!?)

So, how did our magazine subscription sites fare? Pretty well, all told. As far as I can tell, our sites handled the traffic and we did not experience any notable problems.

Overall orders were up 8.6%, and sales were up 11.7%, over the same day last year.

On the internet alone, we had 36% more visitors than this November's average. Internet orders were up 71% over the month's average.

All in all, not too shabby for a company whose internet traffic and sales typically don't peak until the week before Christmas. I'll be keeping close tabs on this as the season unfolds.