Cyber Monday: Holiday for online shoppers

The most well-known of the holiday shopping door-buster sales are the days after Thanksgiving – aka Black Friday – and Christmas, but a new bargain shopping day is steadily gaining recognition.

It is known as Cyber Monday – the Monday following Thanksgiving and Black Friday. In case one has not completely satisfied their desire to shop around the Thanksgiving holiday, shoppers can be thankful for another day of shopping from the convenience of their own home or workplace.

According to DailyPress.com, this new day of big sales came to be when a division of the National Retail Federation, Shop.org, discovered a striking number of people shopping on the Internet from their offices. Web sites soon caught on and posted bargains to lure online shoppers to their checkout pages. Read full article here.

On cybermonday.com, Shop.org’s official Web site for the new virtual shopping holiday, people can find “special offers” for hundreds of retail stores from Barnes & Noble Booksellers to Home Depot. The Web site stated it had offers for free shipping, bargains by the hour, an improved site design and navigation, an environment-conscious section and a new shopping comparison engine.

The site also said its proceeds from Cyber Monday would go to the Ray Greenly Scholarship fund, a scholarship that benefits e-commerce students. According to Shop.org, more than $900,000 has been raised for the fund as of November 2009. Read more here.

How It Works

Signing up to use the site is free, and people can type in what they’re searching for or browse by Black Friday sales, categories, merchants, coupons and deals or free shipping offers. Shoppers can also compare prices and bargains between competing companies to decide where they would get what they want for the least amount of money.

With a click of their mouse, people can go directly to the retailer’s Web site such as BestBuy.com to search through items and make their final purchase. With CyberMonday.com as the middleman, shoppers earn Rebate Dollars every time they use the Web site to buy items, but they have to start at CyberMonday.com.

According to the Cyber Monday Web site, part of the purchase made becomes Rebate Dollars in a shopper’s account. The site stated: “If you have accumulated at least $10 in Rebate Dollars, and you’re a member in good standing of the CyberMonday for Deals & Coupons, we’ll convert the Rebate Dollars to a check and mail it to you.”

The DailyPress.com article said other sites with Cyber Monday deals include Amazon.com’s Gold Box, crazytowndeals.com and deals.woot.com. Staples, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target and J.C. Penney are some big name retailers offering deals for online shoppers.

Online Shoppers, Take Caution

The article also listed several Internet shopping safety guidelines from the National Consumers League.

* Avoid unencrypted or open wireless networks: Don’t shop at a café
with free wireless Internet. Personal information could intercepted.
* Protect your computer: Before getting on the Internet, have
anti-virus software or firewalls downloaded on your computer.
* Know who you’re shopping from: Stay away from unfamiliar retailers
or check their physical address and information before getting
involved with them.
* Pay with credit card: They offer more fraud protection than debit
cards.
* Check for the ‘s’: Make sure there is an ‘s’ as in https or shttp
in beginning of the Web site URL when you are making a purchase.
* Turn off your computer: Leaving your computer on all the time
leaves it open to unwanted software loaded onto the computer.