It should be interesting to see if this coming Monday fulfills, what is fondly referred to as Cyber Monday, the ambitions of online retailers. I know that where I live, Black Friday was a huge shot in the arm for retailers.

“Just as retail shoppers are recovering from Black Friday, online shoppers are about to face Cyber Monday. Monday is the unofficial start of the online holiday shopping season when office workers fresh from their Thanksgiving break hit the online stores from the comfort of their workplaces. Contrary to what some believe, it’s not the biggest online shopping day of the year according to Kamran Pourzanjani President of Pricegrabber.com: “It’s a big day for shopping obviously but it’s not the busiest day. That doesn’t come for another couple of weeks.” Mr. Pourzanjani said that activity on Pricegrabber on the day after thanksgiving was 30 percent higher than that day last year.

Traffic on Thursday was heavy enough to disrupt traffic on Walmart.com, Amazon.com and Disney online shopping sites. Internet servers, like brick and mortar stores, are designed to handle a certain capacity and if they’re overwhelmed, they can slow down or even shut down. If there is a surge of traffic on Monday and sites don’t prepare, we could see more outages if they become overwhelmed.”

Read the full story here.

[tags]Cyber Monday, online, shopping, recipes, helpful hints, gift ideas, cookie recipes,[/tags]