Retailers look to online shoppers during Cyber Monday (+video)

While Black Friday tends to receive more attention, the annual Cyber Monday shopping day is expected to set records this year.

In fact, 2015 is expected to be the most lucrative Cyber Monday — always the first weekday after Thanksgiving — since the unofficial inception of the online marketing day in 2005, according to digital tracking firm Adobe. The firm expects shoppers to dole out about $3 billion over the Internet on Monday.

In south Wichita, one online art business was in the midst of its busiest day of the year, according to its founder.

“We max our capacity on Cyber Monday,” David Sasson, president of Overstockart.com, said Monday morning. “We’ll ship out in the range of 150 items today. This will be our busiest day of the year and our busiest weekend of the year.”

Strictly an online business, Overstockart sells oil-based reproductions of well-known pieces of art. The company’s 8,000-square-foot warehouse and office space was a bustling place Monday morning as employees scurried about finishing, packaging and framing pieces before they shipped out.

The handcrafted pieces, mostly oil paintings produced in China and Vietnam, depict famous displays by such artists as Vincent van Gogh, Oscar-Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso. Sasson, 47, said Overstockart also provides framing, and typically ships between 400 and 500 pieces during a typical week.

For the long Thanksgiving weekend from Black Friday through Monday, Sasson said he expects that Overstockart will do about $100,000 worth of business. adding that e-commerce has come a long way since the inception of Overstockart in 2002.

“Everything is sold online now,” Sasson said. “The technology now is allowing for merchants to sell unique products because we have product zooms and high-resolution images. It’s not really considered technology today because people expect to see exactly what they’re going to buy.

“Being able to essentially put a magnifying glass over an oil painting — that helped us greatly. Now, people can see the texture of the painting when, before that, they were thinking it was just an expensive print. They can see the difference now.”

With special deals and discounts abundant online on Monday, shoppers seemed to have little worry about cyber security and the possibility of identity theft as more than 121 million holiday shoppers planned to shop online Monday, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation. For the entire weekend, the federation predicted that 103 million people will have purchased something online.

Adobe Digital Index reported that online spending Monday during the morning hours until 9 a.m. was up 14 percent this year compared with 2014. Some retailers, including Target and Foot Locker, experienced some glitches Monday, according to a report by the New York Times News Service.

Tom Murray, social media manager for The Golf Warehouse in Wichita, said this year’s Cyber Monday would probably end up on par with 2014. The warehouse sells golf, baseball, soccer and softball equipment.

“(Monday) will be one of our biggest sales days of the year,” Murray said. “It’s an important day for us because we’re predominantly an online retailer.

“Black Friday used to be our most important day, but Cyber Monday has been making up ground lately. They’re pretty close right now.”

Numbers provided by Adobe on Monday showed that smartphones and electronic devices, such as tablets, were helping to drive online sales up. Adobe principal analyst Tamara Gaffney called the apparent retail momentum this holiday shopping season an appropriate “crowning for what’s been a banner year for online sales.”

Regionally, Adobe reported that Thanksgiving weekend online sales in the Kansas City area were expected to be up 31 percent year-over-year from 2014.

This story was originally published November 30, 2015 at 9:44 PM with the headline "Retailers look to online shoppers during Cyber Monday (+video)."