Taking time off from stuffing their faces with turkey and mince pies, nearly 4m Britons waddled away from the dinner table to go online and spend more than £100m on Christmas Day.
According to figures issued by the IMRG, around 3.8m consumers turned their backs on Wallace & Gromit and the Dr Who special to log on and splash out a record breaking £102m online – an average of £26.80 per shopper.
That Christmas Day cash tally was over a fifth up on last year at 21%, although the number of people shopping online on Christmas Day dropped by 14% compared to 2007.
With Christmas Day etailers like Marks and Sparks, John Lewis and Play.com all offering online sales, bargain hunters were clicking themselves into a cash spending frenzy, as James Roper, CEO at IMRG, explained, “The volume of transactions was 26% higher, and the value rose by 21%, indicating that serious bargain hunting was the order of the day.”
Other stats from the online digital research firm eDigitalResearch discovered that online traffic increased by nearly 100% between Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Chris Russell, director at eDigitalResearch, shuffled some print-outs around, looked deeply into his cup of steaming tea and declared, “We noticed that most traditional retailers commenced online sales when stores closed on Christmas Eve, with pure play retailers starting after last delivery day deadlines were reached. This means that the increased purchases on Christmas Day and the huge surge in traffic on Boxing Day could have been as a result of this.”
Wow, I didn’t have time to go online on Christmas day and if I had it wouldn’t have occurred to me to shop! But I suppose it’s in keeping with the commerical overkill that Christmas is becoming. (bah humbug, youth of today.. blame something! .. in my day, etc) I thought most of the sales – both on and offline – started much earlier this year, or is my memory playing tricks on me?
Or perhaps it was emergency present buying – the other half is fuming that you got her saucepans/him an old man present, he’s only 31 you know!/the kids are kicking up a fuss about being bought the wrong action figure – so you get online to order something else to make amends..?
Friends who are in online commerce say that Boxing day is massive day for them – people bored with family/being by themselves.
I guess xmas day is for the impatient!