By Kim Leonard

Published on Nov 30, 2009

Western Pennsylvania residents love to shop online. So it's fitting that a Pittsburgh-area native coined the name for one of the Internet's biggest holiday shopping days.

"Cyber Monday" dates to 2005, when Scott Silverman and the staff at Shop.org surveyed retailers about lucrative sales days on their Web sites.

"Many saw a big sales day the Monday after Thanksgiving," said Silverman, executive director of the online branch of the National Retail Federation. "We put out a press release. The Wall Street Journal picked it up and did 
a big story, and it just snowballed from there, with every evening network news and every newspaper running it."

Four years later, Cyber Monday is ingrained in most merchants' and shoppers' minds.

Shop.org said 87.1 percent of retailers will feature special online deals today.

Last year, 84.6 million people spent $846 million on Cyber Monday. That's up 15 percent from the year before, according to the search engine marketing firm Permuto Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.

Steve Pirring of Lawrenceville said Cyber Monday shopping has become a habit.

"I might do a little more than half of my shopping online for the holidays," said Pirring, who runs the online clothing business Free By Sp.

"I still will go out to the stores. But my income is generated from online, so I like to reciprocate."

Plenty of local residents likely will join him. The Pittsburgh area ranks No. 7 nationwide for its percentage of online population visiting the top 500 retail Web sites, according to Experian Hitwise. The region was No. 12 last year.

Johnstown and Altoona rank even higher, at No. 2. Presque Isle, Maine, topped the latest list.

Silverman, a Churchill High School and University of Pittsburgh graduate, has headed Shop.org since 2001, a few years after online shopping began to hit it big.

Some retailers stumbled in the dot-com era -- the high-profile but short-lived Pets.com pet supply business, and the pre-Christmas 1999 shipping troubles at Toys R Us, for example.

"Retailers learned their lessons early on. Now it's pretty impressive how late you can shop and expect Christmas delivery," Silverman said.

Online shopping this season could increase by about 8 percent, while total holiday sales are projected to decline by 1 percent to $437.6 billion, the National Retail Federation said.

This year, 68.8 million people will buy gifts from their work computers, Shop.org said. That represents more than half of workers with Internet access.

"Work habits change. People now mix a lot of their personal chores with their work and mix work with personal time," Silverman said.

Purchases from work could decline in coming years, as more consumers get high-speed connections for their home computers and use mobile devices, experts say.

From the start, Cyber Monday has drawn skepticism as an over-promoted, even made-up event.

"It's so arbitrary. When you can take delivery (for online orders) through Dec. 20 and even after, it doesn't have a ring of specialness to it," Paula Rosenblum of RSR Research in Miami said.

The busiest shopping day on the Web typically has been between Dec. 5 and Dec. 15, tied to shipping deadlines. The Permuto firm said that could change this year, largely due to more Cyber Monday promotions.

Source: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_655478.html