Black Friday deals have already seeped into Thanksgiving dinner. Now, Wal-Mart is taking the holiday creep one step further.
For the first time this season, the world's largest retailer will kick off its Cyber Week deals the day after Thanksgiving—a time typically reserved for in-store door busters.
The online sale begins at 12:01 a.m. Eastern on Black Friday, with deals including a Samsung 60-inch HD smart TV for more than $1,000 off.
Taking a page from Amazon's success, deals will include items from the company's Marketplace sellers, who have helped beef up Walmart.com's product offering from 8 million items to more than 23 million this year.
The retailer's early Cyber Monday deals come as Walmart.com plans to kick off its online Black Friday sale three hours earlier than last year, at 12:01 a.m. Eastern on Thanksgiving Day. That's hours before its door-buster deals begin in stores, at 6 p.m. that evening.
"By tripling our online product assortment, we're able to offer a lot more new brands and choices to customers all season long," Steve Breen, senior vice president of merchandising for Walmart.com, said in a news release.
The lines between traditional holiday shopping days have gotten more blurred each year, as retailers try to one-up each other to grab a larger share of shoppers' wallets earlier in the season. Macy's, which had opened its stores at 6 p.m. Thanksgiving Day for the past two years, is moving its Black Friday kickoff an hour earlier this year. The season is also lasting longer, with Target extending its free-shipping window an additional week.
The channels are likewise becoming more entwined, as consumers do a larger chunk of their shopping online. Whereas Black Friday deals used to be restricted to a retailer's stores, more are rolling out the option for shoppers to snag those discounts online. Along with Wal-Mart, which is running most of its Black Friday deals online for the second year, Kohl's Black Friday door busters will be available on its website for the first time.
An estimated 137.4 million people plan to shop over the holiday weekend, according to the National Retail Federation. Yet even as Thanksgiving and Black Friday are expected to rake in more digital dollars this year, Cyber Monday is once again seen being the largest sales day of the year, at $3.36 billion, according to Adobe Digital Insights.
