Black Friday and Small Business Saturday are now part of 2012 history, with record sales including Thanksgiving Day. Now research firm comScore predicts Cyber Monday will surpass all three days’ online sales and be the biggest online shopping day of the year for the third consecutive year with $1.5 billion in sales—up 20 percent from 2011. Not too shabby considering its 2011 sales amounted to $1.25 billion, according to comScore, up 22 percent from its previous high in 2010. Even more so, since online Thanksgiving Day traffic increased 71 percent this year as US residents visited online retail sites 181 million times. Likewise, online sales for Thanksgiving Day increased 17.4 percent this in 2012 compared to 2011, and Black Friday Internet sales increased more than 20 percent.

“Is there a Cyber Monday? No. Is there a Cyber Three Weeks? Yes,” Richard Feinberg, professor of consumer behavior and retail management at Purdue University in Indiana, told USA Today.

So is Cyber Monday still necessary as a day of its own? Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD group told Mashable it is definitely losing some of its luster. Mobile shopping has placed online retailers and brick-and-mortar retailers in competition with one another. Therefore, online retailers cannot wait until Cyber Monday to offer their best specials—they have to make them available on Friday or even earlier to get sales from shoppers who carry their smartphones into stores.

“What that does is spread out the sales period, thereby diluting it,” Cohen said. “Retailers now have to promote throughout the whole holiday season to stay competitive.”

Still, since coined by shopping trade group Shop.org in 2005, Cyber Monday is considered the official beginning of the online holiday shopping season. And although millions of shoppers surfed the Web for gifts from their mobile devices as soon as they left the Thanksgiving dinner table, they are still expected to continue shopping when they return to the office on Monday, fueled by the weekend’s excitement and retailers’ online promotions.

“In 2005, when Cyber Monday first earned its moniker, spending on that day reached $484 million—about what Thanksgiving Day had last year,” comScore’s Andrew Lipsman recently wrote online. “By 2011, it had reached an impressive total of $1.25 billion in spending and it remains the heaviest online spending day in history. Today it reigns as clearly the most important online day for retailers—one during which they can expect to generate considerable online sales but also gain all-important mindshare among consumers as they ramp up their spending over the weeks prior to Christmas.”

Retailers will continue to cater to the Monday shopping trend, as well. Amazon.com, for example, began its Cyber Monday specials at midnight Nov. 26 with deals such as 60 percent off a 55-inch television normally priced more than $1,000. K-Mart is offering 75 percent off diamond earrings, and Sears is slashing the price of a Maytag washer and dryer by $130.

Is Cyber Monday as significant as it was seven years ago, though? Now that the majority of Americans have easy access to online shopping from mobile devices or high speed internet, probably not.

“People years ago didn’t have… connectivity to shop online at their homes,” Shop.org executive director Vicki Cantrell told USA Today. “So when they went back to work after Thanksgiving they’d shop on the Monday after. Now they don’t need the work computer to be able to do that.”

Still, Cyber Monday is expected to remain the biggest shopping day in 2012, but that status could easily change within the next couple of years.

“Of all the benchmark spending days, Thanksgiving is growing at the fastest rate, up 128 percent over the last five years,” Lipsman told USA Today.

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