Wal-Mart brings forward Cyber Monday in e-commerce battle with rival Amazon
Wal-Mart has announced that it will launch its Cyber Monday deals a day earlier this year as the retailer looks to step up its efforts to compete with e-commerce titan, Amazon.
Traditionally the biggest online shopping day of the year, Cyber Monday, will now be moved to the Sunday after Thanksgiving as the world's largest retailer by revenue attempts to extend the event in order to capture demand.
The one day shopping event, which until now has fallen the Monday after Black Friday, was established a decade ago when shoppers used the high-speed Internet access at their workplaces to purchase goods online.
With huge advances in broadband since then consumers can now make use of high-speed internet from home and so Walmart are attempting to extend the promotion window in order to chip away at Amazon’s ecommerce dominance which is several times larger than Wal-Mart’s.
Fernando Madeira, chief executive of Walmart.com, said “customers have changed but Cyber Monday hasn’t changed with them. Now everyone has internet."
Wal-Mart will launch 2,000 online-only specials this year which is 500 more than the previous year. The offers will begin at 8pm Eastern US time on Sunday 29 November.
Cyber Monday sales across the entire industry are expected to reach $3bn, up 12 percent from last year, according to projections by Adobe. Cyber Monday is expected to remain the biggest single day in terms of online revenue, with Adobe predicting that sales will rise 15 percent to $2.7 billion.