Retail giant Wal-Mart will begin its online sale a day earlier than usual. Instead of beginning its Cyber Monday sale in the early hours on Nov. 30 as it did in the past years, it will start on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, or on Nov. 29.
Reuters reports that Wal-Mart will quadruple the number of items it would launch online-only to 2,000 items from 500 items in 2014. The items become available at 8 p.m. Eastern U.S. time on Sunday.
Fernando Madeira, chief executive of Walmart.com, explains that because of internet access, it makes no business sense to limit the sale to the weekends preceding Thanksgiving, held every fourth Thursday of November.
He says, "The customers have changed but Cyber Monday hasn't changed with them."
Cyber Monday was introduced by retailers about 10 years ago when consumers who had high-speed internet from their workplace purchased items they saw on Black Friday and the succeeding day in shopping malls but did not buy.
CNET says perhaps it's time to call the event Cyber Sunday instead. Madeira explains that starting earlier makes it easier for customers "to get ahead of the busiest online shopping day of the year and save on the best gifts." He adds that Cyber Monday shopping could be exhausting for working parents and millennials to stay up past midnight to shop online and then wake up early the next day for work.
Black Friday, which has stretched into a four-day shopping frenzy, is one of the best for retailers, next to the Christmas holiday season in terms of sales generated.
Experts forecast that for 2015, Cyber Monday sales will hit $3 billion for the first time, up 12 percent from 2014, based on projections by Adobe. Black Friday sales is expected to generate a slight smaller $2.7 billion sales, up 15 percent from the previous year.