The frenzy of Black Friday may be over but now Cyber Monday has hit.
The Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday and Black Friday is another opportunity for bargain savvy shoppers to splash the cash before Christmas.
As one of the biggest shopping days of the year the impact on business is great.
See how the tech industry feels about potential threats to shoppers and how retailers can be successful.
1. Nick Fletcher, Director of Multichannel Services, Rakuten Marketing
"Retailers must connect the experience they offer on mobile, tablet and laptop so that their dialogue with the customer is seamless and above all, not lost to the competition.
"Overall, those retailers that engage customers throughout the whole weekend will remain front of mind. Brands will need to work especially hard to remind shoppers of items they have expressed interest in to secure sales."
2. Colin Prime Moore, CTO, Ultima Business Solutions
"Black Friday and Cyber Monday present an ideal opportunity for attackers to strike; business’ IT systems become so overloaded with genuine requests that it’s easier for someone to breach security under the radar. Real customers are creating the diversion that hackers can exploit.
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"Businesses and retailers can combat attacks in a number of ways.
"Micro-segmenting systems enables security boundaries around each service or device, and ensures that a breach can be isolated, contained and is easily identifiable – rather than it being open to the whole network.
"This means that an attacker leveraging vulnerability on one device is not instantly provided access to all other devices in the same network."
3. George Skaff, CMO, TouchCommerce
"The terms Black Friday and Cyber Monday suggest that there is a neat divide between physical and online sales, but this is nonsense. Although relatively new, these terms are already retail relics, just like Woolworths or paying by cheque.
"To be successful in today’s retail climate, this means being absolutely everywhere and having the ability to engage with customers wherever they may be, at whatever stage in their journey to purchase."
4. Gabriel Gambill, Director of Product and Program Management, Quorum
"Similar to Black Friday, Cyber Monday is growing in popularity: therefore it is increasingly important for retail businesses to ensure their websites are able to cope with buyer’s demands. During this peak internet-shopping time, businesses with poorly executed business continuity and disaster recovery plans are at great risk.
"It is vital that organisations are prepared in terms of their systems’ ability to deal with the massive traffic surge to their online sites."
5. Paul Henry, IT Security Consultant to the Blancco Technology Group
"Consumers should be more cautious of which mobile sites and apps they use to buy gifts. This doesn’t mean they should stop using mobile sites and apps to buy items – absolutely not.
"But it does mean they should ask questions, do some digging and find out what types of data are being collected and for what purposes before they make a mobile purchase."
