Overstock’s Cyber Monday volume 3.5 times higher than any October Monday

Overstock.com’s Cyber Monday sales volume was three and a half times that of any Monday in October and helped put the online discount retailer back into positive territory, reversing a declining trend that Overstock had shown as a 7% year over year loss for its third quarter and which had continued until early in the fourth quarter, CEO Patrick Byrne tells Internet Retailer. Overstock is No. 18 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites.

But the Monday after Thanksgiving wasn’t the first lift Overstock saw from seasonal shopping. Byrne, who describes the holiday season in retail as “a wave, followed by a tsunami,” says retailers saw the first wave this year in mid-November. “That tide hit the brick and mortar players first – Wal-Mart, Target, J.C. Penney – then the pure plays – us, eBay, Amazon,” he says.

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What Byrne calls the sales volume tsunami started to hit later. “I think Cyber Monday is a little overblown,” he says. “For us, Black Friday was when the first breaker hit, then a bigger breaker on Cyber Monday. There are really five more breakers to come between now and Dec. 14 that are bigger than Cyber Monday.”

One shopping tool geared to keep those breakers rolling over Overstock is a gift finder it introduced two weeks ago, similar to gift finders also featured this year on Walmart.com and Target.com. Designed to speed up gift selection for the shopping-challenged or time–starved, Overstock’s gift-finder asks shoppers who they are buying gifts for, elicits the answers to a few more questions, then delivers a lengthy list of links to category-specific gift selections.

Byrne says the feature is driving two and a half times the dollars in revenue per visit than average. For that reason, Overstock has centered the tool on its home page. “The more we funnel through there, the better,” he says. Another part of Overstock’s competitive strategy this season is free shipping which continues from the holiday weekend through today, followed by dollar shipping which starts on Friday and will continue through the season.