With Cyber Monday behind us, the real holiday shopping season begins

As I wrote last week, the noise around Black Friday and Cyber Monday is mostly a bunch of hype. Both days represent a relatively small percentage of total holiday sales, and are even less important when you consider their contributions to profits given the amount of discounting that occurs. Moreover, there is little evidence that a “good” Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday has anything to do with whether a particular retailer will have a successful quarter or not. It also turns out that many folks take advantage of the past week’s hot deals to buy for themselves, not for Christmas or Hanukkah gifts.

The fact is the overwhelming majority of holiday season revenue for virtually every retailer will occur over the next four weeks, not during the past few days. And, if history is any indication, there will be at least two shopping days ahead that will comfortably exceed Black Friday’s sales numbers. We can also expect that the weekend of December 15 will surpass Cyber Monday’s volume.

We should also not get overly excited by the year-over-year online shopping growth numbers. Merely extrapolating the trend would suggest that e-commerce would grow somewhere in the vicinity of 15%-17%, and that’s exactly what happened. To be sure, the overall shift away from physical store shopping is profound, but nothing unexpected is happening, at least thus far, when it comes to this particular holiday season.

Now that we’ve moved beyond the two hype-iest days of the retail year, let’s bear in mind that there are still 23 shopping days left between now and Christmas and a lot can still happen. We should also remember that the week after Christmas is very important, where big volumes are posted, gift cards are redeemed, returns are processed and the trajectory for seasonal clearance starts to be set.

The good news seems to be that many retailers’ report that their inventories are in solid shape in light of conservative buying patterns. While this suggests deals might not be quite as sharp for consumers as past holidays, the industry might actually have a chance to realize decent gross margins. Of course, some sectors–I’m looking at you department stores!–are in a fierce battle for market share. Several chains, including Sears and Bon-Ton Stores, are facing existential crises, where a bad quarter could lead to their liquidation (or, minimally, additional massive store closings). In these situations we should expect promotional intensity to remain high.

But for now everyone just take a deep breath. Mentally place the stories about Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the “interesting, but not very illuminating” section of your brain and strap in. This next week will likely be the calm before the storm and then things will really start to ramp up. And, for sure, far more will be revealed in the weeks ahead then we learned this past long weekend.

A version of this story appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.

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Originally published at stevenpdennis.com on December 1, 2017.