Retailers, hackers know stakes are high for Cyber Monday

The Cyber Monday appeal of scrolling for holiday deals may have recast the holiday shopping scene, with comScore last year reporting more than $2 billion in desktop sales, a record 24 hours for online shopping.

When the 20 percent of transactions made via mobile devices were factored in, the tally rose to $2.5 billion.

Andrew Lipsman, comScore’s vice president of marketing and insights, said “e-commerce” and “m-commerce,” as mobile commerce is termed, were strong enough to offset the National Retail Federation’s reported 11 percent decline in shopping over the extended Thanksgiving weekend last year.

“The reality is that mobile devices are rapidly changing the way consumers shop and transact,” Lipsman said. “It looks as though 2014 may eventually go down as the year that mobile transformed holiday shopping. And while this change will require retailers to adapt, they can take some comfort in knowing that holiday sales aren’t cratering.”

According to a National Retail Federation survey, 79.6 percent of shoppers — a potential 183.8 million — said they would or might shop online on Cyber Monday. The percentage was even higher among younger shoppers.

According to the survey, 88.7 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 90.9 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds said they would or might take to their laptops and mobile devices and scout the online deals. And they’ll likely be doing it before or after work.

By way of history, the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org in 2005 coined the term “Cyber Monday,” declaring it “the biggest online shopping day of the year.” It birthed a phenomenon of workers furtively using their high-speed office computers to check off the remaining names on their holiday shopping lists. By 2007, headlines were about employers fearing lost productivity.

That’s changed. Retailers now know it’s evolved to a lifestyle choice of scoping deals from the comfort of the kitchen table or living room couch.

Walmart disclosed as much in announcing it was rolling back Cyber Monday offerings to 9 p.m. Sunday evening.

Fernando Madeira, chief executive of Walmart.com, in a news release said people now had high-speed Internet through personal accounts and didn’t need to do their shopping at work.

Madeira said the company saw that searches for Cyber Monday bargains started to pick up Sunday evening, with many shoppers staying up until midnight to make sure they weren’t too late to snatch the best deals.

“It can be exhausting for working parents and millennials to stay up past midnight to shop online, only to wake up early the next day to get ready for work,” Madeira said. “By starting ‘Cyber Monday’ hours earlier on Sunday evening and quadrupling the number of Cyber Monday specials, we’re making it easier for customers to get ahead of the busiest online shopping day of the year and save on the best gifts.”

It’s not that consumers are eschewing brick-and-mortar stores. According to comScore, 44 percent of smartphone owners reported “showrooming,” or visiting stores to “touch and feel” a product before purchasing it online.

“As smartphones equip consumers with information on products that allow them to easily find the lowest price, it is increasingly likely that the consumer ends up completing their purchase someplace other than at the register in-store,” Lipsman said.

Still, online shopping carries risks. Retailers are flooding consumers’ inboxes with enticing offers — and so are pseudo-retailers looking for an inroad to consumers’ bank and credit card accounts.

“The chances of you getting scammed are exponentially higher this time of year,” said Shaun Murphy, a former government security consultant who is CEO and inventor of SNDR.com, a messaging and file-sharing app. “Criminals are out and about this time of year more so then any other time of the year because they can make a quick buck here and there with people that let their guard down, people that are really looking to score that sweet deal.”

Web scammers will send emails providing links that don’t go to actual product or legitimate vending sites, he said. Consumers end up unwillingly sharing valuable data.

“If a deal sounds too good to be true, you’ve got to really watch out for that,” he said. “You know how can you tell if it’s too good to be true? Most of the time Black Friday deals, they are too good to be true, and that’s why they’re limited.”

He recommended hovering over links or cutting and pasting them into a browser to see what comes up before visiting the site.

Public Wi-Fi should be a shopping no-no, Murphy said, and consumers need to be extra vigilant about where they use their cellphones.

“You don’t know who’s Wi-Fi you’re jumping on,” he said. “You click on something that says ‘free Wi-Fi.’ It could be some shady character 100 feet away from you on their laptop that you’re transmitting all your details to.”

Credit cards are a much safer bet than debit cards, as credit card companies will eat fraudulent charges and there’s no risk of a hacker draining a bank account and causing the mortgage check to bounce, he added. Statements should be gone over with a fine-toothed comb.

“One of the things criminals will do, especially this time of the year, is they capture the information — but they don’t necessarily use it,” he said. “Some time in January or December, you get a small little tiny charge on your credit card, $1 ,$2, but you can’t account for that. What they do is they prove that they have a working card.”

Nicole Beebe, an information security expert at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said cyber criminals were posting malicious shopping links based on trending toys and other products.

“When there’s a new news story, hackers and folks who are trying to get malware put on people’s machines will put up bogus websites for news-related items. … It will be higher ranked on the list because it’s new content. And then just going to that site, then you’ve got what you call drive-by attacks,” she said. “Cyber criminals are doing the same thing with Cyber Monday.”

Some safety tips? Sites should be encrypted and sporting visible lock icons. Third-party pay systems such as PayPal add another level of security. In terms of mobile platforms, Apple has proved more secure than Android. Big-box retailers and reputable online marketplaces such as Etzy.com are a lot safer than “somebody just selling you something out of their cyber back door,” she said.

“It’s like going to a town, a new city,” she said. “You don’t necessarily know which streets are bad, but you know which areas are good. ... When in doubt, don’t go to it.”

lbrezosky@express-news.net