Website targets Christmas shop
‘‘CYBER MONDAY’’ – a day on which the country’s online retailers offer special deals to consumers – is coming to New Zealand.
More than 50 New Zealand online retailers will emulate the US tradition and offer special deals to Christmas shoppers through a website that will go live at 7pm on November 25 and which will be open for only 24 hours.
Similar promotions have proved popular in the United States and have been attempted with mixed results in Australia.
Cyber Monday falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving, when sales mark the unofficial start of the US holiday season and online purchasing goes through the roof. US online sales on Cyber Monday last year jumped 17 per cent over and above the same day in 2011, to top US$1.5 billion (NZ$1.81b).
The New Zealand version, ‘‘Click Monday’’, is being organised by Auckland e-commerce consultant Cate Bryant.
Briscoes, Ezibuy, Hallensteins, Pascoes, Bendon and Icebreaker are among the firms that will offer special deals and Trade Me, Grabone and MediaWorks would promote the initiative, she said. Shoppers will be able to view offers on the Click Monday website and then click through to the retailers’ sites to complete their purchases.
Brett Nicholls, general manager of participating kitchen company Stevens, said it saw it as a great promotional opportunity. Icebreaker also confirmed its involvement but, like Stevens, said it was still working out the details so could not comment on what it might offer.
Bryant said retailers who advertised last year on a similar one-day website in Australia, Click Frenzy, on average ex- perienced a 250 per cent uplift in online sales during the course of the promotion, generating an extra $10 million in sales.
That was despite the heavily promoted Australian site crashing under the weight of traffic, and criticism from some consumers that many of the deals it offered were run-of-the-mill.
One disappointed shopper posting on a News Corp website complained the Australian event was a waste of time and ‘‘all hype’’. There was ‘‘nothing I saw that I considered an awesome bargain or discount that I wouldn’t be able to get any other day of the week by doing some research first’’.
Bryant is establishing a new industry body, the National Online Retailers Association (Nora), to represent online retailers and involved firms.
Nora would help address a skills shortage that threatened to hold back the growth of online retailing, Bryant said. ‘‘We are planning a New Zealand-based conference, seminars and networking forums, and we will provide a voice to government about the industry’s direction, compliance issues and policy.’’
A report issued by the Retailers Association on Thursday estimated New Zealanders had spent $5b over the past year buying physical and ‘‘digital’’ goods online, with about half of that spending going the way of overseas retailers.