Cyber Monday's ramping up

NEW YORK - Black Friday is a distant memory. Small Business Saturday is long gone. Now, it's Cyber Monday's turn.

The term was coined in 2005 by a shopping trade group that noticed a spike in online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving when people returned to their work computers. It is the next in a line of days that stores are counting on to jumpstart the holiday shopping season.

This year's Cyber Monday is expected to be the biggest online shopping day of the year for the third year in a row. Research firm comScore says Americans are expected to spend $1.5 billion, up from $1.25 billion last year, as retailers ramp up deals to get shoppers to click on their websites.

Amazon.com, which is starting its Cyber Monday deals at midnight, is offering as much as 60 percent off a Panasonic Viera 55-inch TV that's usually priced higher than $1,000. Sears is offering $430 off a Maytag washer and dryer, each on sale for $399. And Kmart is offering 75 percent off diamond earrings and $60 off a 12-in-1 multigame table on sale for $89.99.

Retailers are hoping the deals will appeal to shoppers like Matt Sexton, 39, who for the first time plans to complete all his holiday shopping online this year on his iPad. Sexton, who plans to spend up to $4,000 this season, already shopped online on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and found such deals as a laptop from Best Buy for $399, a $200 savings.

"The descriptions and reviews are so much better online so you can compare and price shop and for the most part get free shipping," said Sexton, of Queens, N.Y., and a manager at a utility company.

How well retailers do on Cyber Monday will offer insight into Americans' evolving shopping habits. With the growth in high-speed Internet access and the increasing use of smartphones and tablet computers, people are relying less on their work computers than when Shop.org, the digital division the National Retail Federation, coined the term Cyber Monday.

As a result, the period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday has become busy for online shopping as well. Indeed, IBM Benchmark, which tracks online sales, said that on Thanksgiving, a day that historically had not been big for online shopping, online sales this year rose 17.4 percent over 2011. Of that, mobile shopping rose 18.3 percent. Meanwhile, online sales on Black Friday were up 20.7 percent.

Even though Cyber Monday is expected to be the biggest shopping day this year, industry watchers say it could just be a matter of time before other days take that ranking.

"Of all the benchmark spending days," said Andrew Lipsman, a comScore spokesman, "Thanksgiving is growing at the fastest rate, up 128 percent over the last five years."