If Cyber Monday was a person, it would be nearly old enough to join the military. But with the e-commerce creation just days away — in a retail landscape awash in online deals and concerns about tamer sales growth — some have begun to wonder whether it is still relevant. Asked whether Cyber Monday was, in fact, still a thing, analysts generally answered with a qualified “yes.” But as the boundaries for holiday shopping season grow more diffuse, they suggested it was more of a deadline for nailing online deals.
“There is this sense that Cyber Monday might be the last day where I’ll get the deals to be as strong as I’d like them to be,” said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights. “When we look at our historical data, there is some truth to that — that the deals get weaker after Cyber Monday.” Pandya said customers certainly still shop on Cyber Monday, a concept whose origins are often attributed to a 2005 press release from a division of the National Retail Federation. And Adobe Analytics’ forecasts call for Cyber Monday to still be the biggest online retail-spending day of the year, with $11.2 billion in sales, for a 5% year-over-year gai …