Boxing Day was biggest online shopping day ever: new report
Boxing Day 2013 was the biggest and busiest day ever for UK online retailers as consumers made 129 million visits to retail websites.
Figures released by the global information services company Experian show that website visits increased by 15% year-on-year making 26 December the biggest online shopping day ever.
In total the UK spent 17 million hours browsing and shopping online on Boxing Day 2013. In addition, UK shoppers spent 44.3 million hours shopping online across Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
James Murray, digital insight manager for Experian Marketing Services, explained: “Online retail records have been broken again for the fourth time this December with an astonishing Boxing Day performance. The figure of 129 million retail visits is 8% bigger than any other online retail day in history.
“A number of factors have contributed to this performance. Boxing Day has always been a key shopping day for consumers to spend money and vouchers received on Christmas Day and to organise for returns or exchanges of unwanted gifts. More importantly, Boxing Day is perhaps the biggest sales day of the year – with keen shoppers looking for the best bargains available.
“What we’ve seen this year is that shoppers were planning their Boxing Day bargain hunting on Christmas Day as one in every 88 searches made in the UK on Christmas Day included the word ‘sale’ or ‘sales’. Christmas Day itself, although not as big as Boxing Day, has once again seen significant growth in online retail visits, highlighting that 25 December is becoming an important online shopping day in its own right.”
Additional findings include:
• There were 90 million online retail visits on Christmas Eve 2013 (up 6% year-on-year) and 114 million online retail visits on Christmas Day (up 6% year-on-year)
• Boxing Day 2013 was the biggest day ever online shopping day (again) for the sixth year in a row
• Boxing Day 2013 was 8% bigger than Middle Cyber Monday (9 December 2013) which was the previous record holder for online shopping visits.
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