The 2020 Cyber Five shopping period broke all previous records for Cyber Five spending, coming in at about 38 billion USD (compared to 28.5 billion USD in 2019). This probably won’t come as a surprise as Black Friday and Cyber Monday moved almost entirely online, followed by record-breaking Amazon Prime Day and Singles Day preceding the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Despite the continued onslaught of Covid-19, good news about successful vaccine trials and greater certainty of a peaceful transfer of power to the new president-elect in the United States contributed to a boost in consumer confidence. 

Every year, China’s Singles Day -- the world’s biggest online shopping event -- manages to top its scale and performance from the previous year. Despite the ravages of coronavirus -- or possibly because of them -- Singles Day 2020 promises to double up on its singular focus by expanding the scope of Singles Day itself. In fact it’s already begun. 

Unlike previous years, Amazon Prime Day 2020 didn’t see any major technical glitches or outages. Apart from occasional page load timeouts and slow performance at peak times, the online shopping experience was reportedly smooth. More generally across the e-commerce sector, trends emerged to show and counter the influence of Amazon Prime Day: non-Amazon e-commerce sites offering promotions during Prime Day saw up to four-times-higher traffic than normal compared with sites that offered no promotions, and comparison shopping became the norm rather than the exception.

Ahead of this year’s Amazon Prime Day, moved this year to October 13 and 14, 2020, and other major online shopping days, such as Singles Day and the Cyber Five weekend in late November, it’s worth examining both e-commerce best practices for big shopping periods and how much e-commerce has changed since last year.