Categories: Web

Here’s 2012’s key online holiday shopping dates – with one surprise

While Cyber Monday has cemented itself as the single most important online holiday shopping date since 2010, a surprising trend has seen Thanksgiving Day emerge as a day used increasingly for shopping activity.

Thanksgiving’s five-year growth rate to 2011 has surged to 128%, surpassing Cyber Monday’s five-year growth rate of 106%, Black Friday’s 88% and Green Monday’s 71% growth rate.

While Thanksgiving is seeing the largest growth in terms of spend, it’s still far behind Cyber Monday. Last year consumers in the United States spent $479 million on Thanksgiving compared to $1.25 billion on Cyber Monday.

Overall, the holiday season growth rate over the past five years is 51%.

Key 2012 holiday season shopping days

  • Thanksgiving Day – November 22, 2012
  • Black Friday – November 23, 2012
  • Cyber Monday – November 26, 2012
  • Green Monday – December 10, 2012

Cyber Monday first earned its moniker in 2005 and, at the time, ranked between 8th and 12th among holiday season spending days. After some attractive discounts and heavy promotion by retailers, Cyber Monday became the third highest grossing holiday spending day in 2008. In 2009, Cyber Monday ranked second. Then in 2010, Cyber Monday became the single most important holiday season spending day and has retained that title since.

This year, spending is expected to exceed $1.5 billion on Cyber Monday.

Albizu Garcia

Albizu Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gain -- a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and social media managers, their clients and anyone working in teams.

View Comments

Recent Posts

DARPA wants ‘smart bandages’ to sense, treat & prevent infections

DARPA is putting together a research program to develop bioelectronic "smart bandages" loaded with sensors…

23 hours ago

A new era of efficiency for North American power introduced as KYRO and LS Power Grid partner-up 

According to Ember, the US generates 41% of its electricity from clean sources, higher than…

2 days ago

Dark Web Monitoring and Data Integrity

By Tammy Harper, Senior Threat Intelligence Researcher at Flare When people think about dark web…

4 days ago

Solving electric vehicle charging challenges with off-grid innovation

The electric vehicle (EV) industry is growing with automakers and many governments pushing for further…

4 days ago

Silicon Valley’s Silent Ideological War

There's a war happening in Silicon Valley. Not the kind with missiles and tanks, but one…

4 days ago

AI-Generated Content Ranks, But There’s a Big Catch

Cast your mind back to the early days of generative AI. In March 2023, ChatGPT 4…

4 days ago