As we sit down at our desks this Monday after digesting a weekends worth of Thanksgiving meals and leftovers, many of us will find ourselves going online to shop in the cyber equivalent of “Black Friday,” which has traditionally been the busiest shopping day of the Christmas season. For retailers, both online and off, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are the most important, if not the most wonderful, time of the year. Shopping is as intertwined with Thanksgiving as Football - speaking of which, how about that Tony Romo? The reality of the importance this time of year has for retailers was underscored during the Great Depression when Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier so retailers would have more time to sell their products before Christmas. The new tradition took hold and is the reason Thanksgiving is celebrated during the third Thursday of November each year.

Cyber Monday is the new way consumers and retailers have found to ease the holiday rush and allow time strapped shoppers the ability to spend themselves to the limit in the comfort and security of their office cubicle. Retailers have realized over recent years that time has become the new luxury for shoppers and that offering convenience is the way to better business. Online shopping is, or at least should be, about convenience. The key elements of convenience being:

• Checking the availability of a product without driving to a store
• Performing price comparisons quickly and easily
• Finding out about popular (or even unusual) products for each type of person on your gift list
• Having presents delivered to distant friends and family
• Reminders of past gifts and easy repeat purchases - I had to work that one in there, its really cool - check it out.

The benefits of shopping online are clear to consumers; for retailers it has been a mixed bag. Pure online retailers like Amazon have captured large amounts of revenue but have not yet realized significant profit, while traditional retailers like Walmart have fought back with redesigned websites but have faced their own issues providing a satisfactory experience to their online customers. While the news headlines will likely state that online shopping has grown by some impressive percentage this holiday season, the experience online has only recently begun fulfilling its promise of convenience to consumers and has yet to expand its value proposition beyond that. In coming holiday seasons expect to see more elements of social networking mixed into the online shopping experience. Online shopping is not a zero sum game with offline shopping. By offering unprecedented convenience, fine tuned suggestive selling, and creating a new virtual, social, and entertaining element to the online shopping experiences retailers will be rewarded with incremental increased spending by shoppers - to the benefit of retailers and gift recipients alike.