Today is Cyber Monday, the unofficial kickoff of the holiday shopping season on the web. While there have been dour predictions for offline holiday spending this year, hurt by the housing market crisis and skyrocketing gas prices, online spending looks once again to be rosy, with forecasters predicting a 20 percent increase over last year, to nearly $25 billion. Much of that will be spent at work, where more and more people are doing their shopping. Indeed, a large part of why the online holiday shopping season does not kick off until today is that many offices are closed on Black Friday. According to a study by BIGResearch for Shop.org, slightly more than half of respondents plan to shop at the office this year, including 57 percent of male respondents. They will find a lot more bargains today than last year, as the e-tailing community further embraces the two-year-old concept of Cyber Monday. Some 72 percent plan to offer some sort of special promotion today, from free shipping to one-day sales, up from 47 percent two years ago. Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, the digital division of the National Retail Federation, talks to Media Life about online spending forecasts, shopping at the office, and why Cyber Monday is not actually the year’s biggest online buying day.

 
This year more shoppers than ever say they will be doing their online shopping from the office. Why is that?
 
You would expect that as people have broadband access at home, the need to shop at work would decline, but we’re actually seeing the opposite happen. I think there’s a bigger trend in place, other than workplace habits are changing. I would expect people are doing more personal work at work.
 

Who's most likely to shop at the office, demographically speaking, and why?
 
It’s definitely younger people. Close to 73 percent of 18-24s are likely to shop at work, compared to about 55.5 percent overall. Men are more likely than women--57.3 percent versus 51.7 percent of women.

The younger people doing shopping this way makes sense. These are people that grew up with the internet and you’d expect them to do more shopping online.

The difference between men and women I don’t really have an answer to. When ecommerce was new, men were more likely to shop online than women because it was more of a techy-type thing, but that has flipped in recent years.
 

You found that the internet will influence 30.2 percent of all holiday sales this year. What does that mean and how much will that number keep growing?
 
What we’re seeing is the internet is influencing sales, so a lot of people that are browsing online may then go and make a purchase offline. I think there’s absolutely a tremendous amount of growth potential there.
 

This year, the majority of online retailers will feature Cyber Monday promotions, which is way up from just two years ago. Why are we seeing this change?
 
Well, for the Cyber Monday promotions, it’s important to understand that it didn’t really come into play until 2005. And that year it caught a lot of people by surprise.

While retailers knew there was a surge in sales that day, just 40 percent were running promotions on that day. Then it really took hold and repeated in 2006, and I think that’s how we got to such a huge number of retailers in 2007.
 

A large chunk plan to offer free shipping on all purchases. Is this becoming more common for the holidays, and does it really help draw in consumers?
 
It is absolutely compelling to consumers. We survey them and they say they love it, that it’s the one promotion they’d like to see from retailers. So many are offering free shipping, nearly eight in 10 during the holidays, it’s becoming a cost of doing business.
 

What sort of dollar total do you expect for Cyber Monday?
 
We don’t have a dollar total for Cyber Monday, but for the year we’re expecting online sales to be almost $260 billion. That’s about an 18 percent increase from 2006.
 

Is it the biggest online shopping day of the year, or does that actually belong to another day?
 
All studies show it belongs to a different day, which would be later in December, probably the week of Dec. 10, and that’s tied to when a lot of the retailers have deadlines for standard or free shipping.
 
Cyber Monday is really the kickoff of the online holiday shopping season, kind of the other side of Black Friday. People may go out to the stores and get some ideas of what to buy, and then they begin shopping online at work, as well as at home.