By Phil Grier
Yahoo Small Business Merchant Development

Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) and Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) are historically the two busiest online shopping days of the year for many online retailers. Some retailers on our platform can make up to 30% of their annual sales during these few days after Thanksgiving. We expect to see more orders placed via mobile devices this holiday season than ever before. Since it’s such an important time, we drilled into last year’s ecommerce sales data to help you maximize your store’s sales this holiday season.

Let’s start by looking at the Top 10 online shopping days for all Yahoo stores combined in 2014.

Here are some insights we can gain from this data.

1. Six of the top ten sales days are Mondays and Tuesdays. Make sure you are stocked up and are ready for business coming out of the weekend, because your buyers are headed back to work, where they evidently do a lot of online shopping.

2. The third and seventh highest online sales days in the holiday season were December 15 and 16. These are the last minute shoppers. Try to highlight your fast shipping times during these days. Include a holiday shipping calendar so shoppers know how late they can buy from you. Have a list of items that will ship last minute if you can’t guarantee all items will ship on time.

3. The day after Cyber Monday reported the fifth highest revenue day of the year. If you normally run a sale from Black Friday through Cyber Monday to incentivize conversion, think about including Tuesday, December 2 as well.

4. An interesting omission from this Top 10 list is the Saturday right in the middle of the Black Friday to Cyber Monday spread. This is “Small Business Saturday”, which promotes making purchases locally at brick-and-mortar small businesses, so if you have a physical location hopefully you see increased sales to make up for lower online sales. Otherwise, Saturdays are the lowest online revenue days of the week year-round, and this busiest time of year is no exception.

Armed with this data, be aggressive with your advertising and promotions especially on these days when shoppers will be out in force. You’ll want to be front and center, ready to convert.

It looks like we need to come up with more catchy names for these dates!

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