Thanksgivig has marked the start of the holiday shopping season for decades. The Macy's Day parade started nearly a hundred years ago in 1924, and the 'black Friday' term has been used in marketing for over 50 years. For most of this time, the only focus was on in-store shopping, primarily because that's all that was available to consumers.

Over the last 25 years, digital commerce has slowly, until this year, taken a bigger percentage of retail shopping spend. It started slowly, and ecommerce companies initially marketed 'Cyber Monday' as an additional shopping day, tacitly acknowledging the dominance of physical retail and 'black friday' sales events.

Over the last 5 years, the attention on cyber Monday has plateaued, and even declined. There's a lot less need for a separate holiday for ecommerce, as it has become the primary way of commerce for millions of consumers. These consumers don't look at physical retail as the first solution for shopping in most scenarios, and already have shifted holiday shopping accordingly.

This year, ecommerce has surged and many more consumers look to digital commerce first, out of either necessity of preference. Brands have responded by beefing up digital infrastructure, improving fulfillment, and shifting budgets away from overpriced physical space to digital spending. As the pandemic numbers surge across the country and additional lockdowns looms, brands will shift marketing to promote digital commerce means that provide a safe way to shop, add greater scalability and harness the new digital investments made this year.

There's been an enormous surge towards digital in 2020, and all the parts in place for this holiday season so spark a digital shopping surge unlike anything in the past. Brands have made investments in digital commerce, physical retail faces many challenges, and there's little resistance from consumers to shifting shopping habits. The next 6 weeks will be the biggest surge to digital commerce in history, and it's just getting started.