Web trackers ComScore recently predicted that $900 million in sales could be spent online today (Cyber Monday), when retailers offer steep discounts and free shipping on their sites. That big number follows an 11% surge this recent Black Friday ($595 million in sales) making this first holiday shopping season after the great economic meltdown of 2008/09 somewhat of a success. I’m going to go one step further and say on behalf of Thirdi and the Senses team that $1 billion could be spent today when all is said and done, because why the hell not? Doesn’t that sound more impressive?

Ecommerce has truly emerged as an increasingly important engine of consumer spending these past few years, and improvements in shopping cart software, website design, and online marketing through social media and other avenues continues to push ecommerce to the forefront of consumer behavior.

Some believe that the next step will be an integration of social media and TV, but there’s been a counterpoint to that claim (by an un-named source close to this Senses blogger who is developing a social media TV platform- apparently it’s tricky!) I think it’s obvious that it will be tough to do the social TV thing because being social and paying attention to Gossip Girl at the same time can be very difficult, as Gossip Girl can be very intense.  So intense that I am commonly silenced and banished from the living room when it is on. So next Christmas shopping season will you be watching the classic Christmas cartoons and ordering things off e-bay during commercials? Probably not, but as the start to this holiday shopping season has shown, the game is changing. TV will obviously have to adapt, as retailers have now discovered. Social media marketing has been a great success as Black Friday sales attest to, and online sales have risen dramatically this Cyber Monday thanks to the evolution of ecommerce.

Companies are increasingly becoming more self reliant when it comes to ecommerce, many of them focusing more on overhead-minimal ecommerce than “brick and mortar” sales now. Much of the nuts and bolts of ecommerce used to be contracted out by companies to the wizards who understood it, but as Shopping cart software concepts and ecommerce services have become more open and competitive, and as they have become demystified, some large companies have even begun to manage their ecommerce entirely in-house. This weekend, Target announced that it would be doing just that. After nearly a decade of having Amazon.com manage their ecommnerce needs, the retailer figures that it could save money and offer a better “..customized multi-channel experience” for their customers by eliminating the middle man. Maybe someone at Target stumbled upon a Ronald Coase book or something.

Integrated design approaches to websites that factor in dynamic marketing and promotional directions as well as combining physical world storespace with online counterparts (like the online kiosks at Chapters and other retailers) mean it’s just logistically easier and more cost effective for retailers like Target to do this on their own. What remains to be seen is whether their integrated ecommerce platform will be as robust and well received (that is not too alien to their current ecommerce customers and not full of bugs) that this turns out to be the most responsible decision in the long run. Or will they go crawling back to Amazon? I think they’ll be OK…or will they?

They probably will.

…Or will they?