Cyber Monday started as a marketing invention and turned into the single biggest online shopping day in the United States. In 2025, US shoppers spent a record $14.25 billion online on Cyber Monday alone, according to Adobe Analytics — enough to outpace Black Friday’s online total for the day. For a term that a retail trade group essentially coined to give online stores their own moment, that’s a remarkable run.
What Cyber Monday is
Cyber Monday is the Monday after Thanksgiving, when online retailers run their heaviest discounts and promotions of the holiday season. The National Retail Federation’s Shop.org division coined the term in 2005, after noticing a spike in online orders the Monday people returned to work — back when home internet was slower than office connections and shoppers used their work machines to buy what they’d browsed over the weekend. The behavior that created the name is long gone, but the shopping event it described kept growing.
It now functions as the digital bookend to Black Friday’s in-store tradition, though in practice the two have blurred into a single “Cyber Week” stretching from Thanksgiving through the following Monday.
Why it matters to marketers
Cyber Monday compresses an enormous amount of buying intent into a single day. That concentration is the opportunity and the problem at once. Every competitor is discounting, every inbox is flooded, and ad auction prices climb as everyone bids for the same attention. The brands that win aren’t usually the ones with the steepest discount, they’re the ones who showed up prepared.
From our agency experience, the single biggest mistake businesses make is treating Cyber Monday as a one-day event you can improvise. The customers who buy on Cyber Monday were, in most cases, warmed up weeks earlier. By the time the day arrives, the work that determines your results is already done.
How to actually prepare
A practical sequence we use with clients, working backward from the day itself:
- Build the audience early. Run awareness and email-capture campaigns in late October and early November. The cheapest Cyber Monday traffic is the audience you already gathered, not the cold clicks you’ll overpay for on the day.
- Plan the offer, not just the discount. Decide what’s actually on sale, what the margin floor is, and whether bundles or a free-shipping threshold will protect your average order value. A blanket sitewide percentage is the easiest offer to run and the easiest way to erode your margins.
- Stress-test the site. Traffic spikes break things. Check page speed, mobile checkout, and server capacity before the day. A site that slows to a crawl during peak hours is leaving money on the table while you watch.
- Sequence your emails. A teaser, an early-access window for your best customers, the main launch, and a “last chance” send usually outperforms a single blast. Segment so loyal buyers feel like insiders.
- Extend the window deliberately. Most retailers now run deals across the whole weekend and beyond. Decide your start and end on purpose rather than letting it sprawl, and use the extended window to recover abandoned carts.
What we consistently see is that the abandoned-cart follow-up does some of the heaviest lifting on Cyber Monday. Shoppers are comparison-buying across a dozen tabs, and a timely reminder — sometimes with a small nudge — recovers a meaningful share of carts that would otherwise vanish.
Cyber Monday vs. Black Friday
The original split was simple: Black Friday was the in-store door-buster day, Cyber Monday was its online counterpart. That line has mostly dissolved. Black Friday is now a massive online event in its own right, and many retailers run continuous deals from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday rather than treating them as two distinct days. For planning purposes, it’s more useful to think in terms of the full Cyber Week than to obsess over which single day performs best — your customers certainly aren’t drawing that line.
Frequently asked questions
When is Cyber Monday?
It falls on the Monday immediately after Thanksgiving in the US, which lands in late November or early December depending on the year. Because Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November, the date shifts annually.
Is Cyber Monday bigger than Black Friday?
For online sales, Cyber Monday has typically edged out Black Friday in the US in recent years. Black Friday still carries more in-store volume, so which is “bigger” depends on whether you’re counting online only or total retail.
Do I have to offer huge discounts to compete?
No. Deep discounts are one approach, but value can come from bundles, free shipping, exclusive early access, or limited bonus items. Protecting your margin while still giving shoppers a reason to act often beats racing competitors to the lowest price.
Should a small business even bother with Cyber Monday?
Often yes, because buying intent is unusually high and customers are actively looking for deals. The key is to compete on something other than raw price — a focused offer to an audience you’ve already built will outperform trying to out-discount large retailers.
Related terms
- Black Friday — Cyber Monday’s in-store sibling, now blended into the same shopping weekend.
- Email Marketing — the channel that does the most work warming up and converting Cyber Monday buyers.
- Abandoned Cart — recovering these is one of the highest-return tactics on a high-traffic sale day.
- Conversion Rate — the metric that tells you whether all that traffic actually turned into orders.
- Average Order Value — the number bundles and free-shipping thresholds are designed to protect during a sale.
