Walmart to offer Cyber Monday deals from Black Friday

Walmart has advanced post-Black Friday online deals  this year to ensure that the momentum is maintained during the crucial upcoming shopping weekend.

With its eyes firmly on Amazon.com, the world's largest retailer said today that it would start a new batch of what it called ''Cyber Week deals'' on Friday, 25 November, a minute after midnight Eastern time, to keep the momentum going.

Such deals were first seen last year on the Saturday of the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Walmart had not yet announced its Cyber Monday plans, but last year, Cyber Monday turned into Cyber Sunday  with promotions starting at 6pm that evening.

According to commentators, the earlier start would also help showcase the new strategy in Walmart's e-commerce arsenal.

Meanwhile, the retailer had this summer completed a long-awaited overhaul, which had seen a rapid rise in its assortment of merchandise from 8 million a year ago to 23 million items. The company now boasted 3,000 marketplace sellers and with the expansion, shoppers would be able to find many items they would never find in a Walmart store, including products from the upscale fashion brand Michael Kors.

The benefits of that effort were clearly seen in the report Thursday that global e-commerce sales had increased 20.6 per cent in the third quarter, a marked re-acceleration over earlier quarters. 

The year-end shopping season, which extends across November and December, was crucial to many retailers, as the two months could account for anywhere from 20 to 40 per cent of their annual sales. The National Retail Federation has projected industry holiday sales to grow at 3.6 per cent this year to $655.8 billion.

According to Walmart, orders placed via the Walmart mobile app and picked up in store, increased over 75 per cent as against the first two weeks of November from the same period a year earlier.