Cyber Monday 2017 UK Deals
Cyber Monday 2017 is the perfect opportunity for you to snaffle up some huge discounts on tech gadgets, off the back of the US Thanksgiving holiday and Black Friday, so fire up your web browsers and prepare to start shopping.
The term 'Cyber Monday' was coined more than a decade ago to encourage people to do more shopping online, web retailers offered more discounts, shoppers picked up more stuff, and the cycle has continued to get us where we are today.
Last year was another record-breaker, according to the stats: the $3.45 billion that users spent online on Cyber Monday 2016 made it the biggest day in US e-commerce histor.
In the UK a quarter of all consumers were planning to pick up a discounted deal on Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year, and that strong interest shows no signs of abating just yet. Brace yourself for another busy day of online shopping this year.
When is Cyber Monday 2017?
The weekend of discounts begins with the Thanksgiving holiday on the Thursday, then Black Friday the day after, and Cyber Monday three days after that. Cyber Monday 2017 is going to be on November 27.
On Black Friday, the focus is usually on both high street stores as well as online retailers, but Cyber Monday tends to concentrate more on shopping on the web (hence the name). In fact, the term "Cyber Monday" was first invented as a way to get people to spend more cash shopping online, at a time when web retail wasn't quite the big business that it is now.
The weekend as a whole marks a great chance to grab some big discounts before the run-up to Christmas starts, so you might want to stock up on gifts for friends and family as well as yourself. In total, we spent close to £6 billion in the UK over both Cyber Monday and Black Friday.
The origins of Cyber Monday are just good timing: shoppers who are either clicking away back at work after Thanksgiving break, or surfing the web during an extended holiday at the end of the long weekend. If you need to work out when Cyber Monday actually is, Thanksgiving always falls on the fourth Thursday in November in the US, with Cyber Monday then following on at the end of that weekend. The holiday isn't as widely celebrated in the UK, but the same big shopping days now apply on both sides of the Atlantic.
Why Cyber Monday matters
Cyber Monday is a win-win for shoppers and retailers alike, driving a strong uptick in sales as the holiday shopping season starts, and giving all of us some very tempting offers at the same time. It's really no surprise that Cyber Monday continues to grow in scale every year. In the opinion of Dom Joseph, CEO of ad tech firm Captify: "What works very much in Cyber Monday's favour is that it is the last significant retail 'day' before Christmas, in which people have the opportunity to pick up a heavily discounted bargain."
Black Friday is an important influence as well as well, because without Black Friday there's no Cyber Monday. If you've missed out on the weekend sales or not had time to get online, then you've still got Cyber Monday to fall back on, with shoppers taking up the last opportunity to land a deal before December starts.
Cyber Monday just keeps getting bigger and bigger - or at least that's how it feels - and so many consumers now deliberately wait for the day (and Black Friday) to come around, saving their cash beforehand. That makes the battle between retailers even more competitive, which in turn should give us some very appealing deals to pick from.
Shopping on Cyber Monday 2017
All the usual benefits of online shopping apply to shopping on Cyber Monday 2017: you can do it from the comfort of your own home, you can compare dozens of products and prices in seconds, and you can purchase your goods almost instantly.
There's only one small downside, which is you might not get your gadgets immediately, but even so, with delivery times getting faster and faster and the risk of wasting your time queueing on the high street, many people would consider that a trade-off that's well worth it.
While a few Cyber Monday deals have some kind of time restriction on them, a lot are going to be running all day, stats from previous years show. You don't necessarily have to sneak out of the office to get your order in.
According to the experts, Cyber Monday also sees a broader range of deals across each individual retailer, so it's less about one-off discounts and more about lower prices across the board. That said, some stores will follow-up Black Friday discounts with further reductions on Cyber Monday if they still need to shift some stock.
