Christmas Day online sales set to top 800 million pounds

UK shoppers are set to spend 805 million pounds online on Christmas Day, an increase of 10.1 percent on the same day in 2015, according to research from IMRG.

The research is based on online sales data from IMRG and supported by online site traffic volume data from SimilarWeb and suggests that this year’s Christmas Day will see consumers outspending 2015 when 728 million pounds was spent.

IMRG also adds that Boxing Day is set to get close to being a billion-pound online shopping day, with total spend forecast to hit 984 million pounds, a 15 percent increase on Boxing Day 2015 when spend was estimated to be 856 million pounds.

However, both those days would still fall behind Black Friday’s 1.23 billion pounds spent.

Justin Opie, managing director, IMRG said:“It might not seem an obvious fixture in the retail calendar, but Christmas Day has actually become a fairly significant online shopping day in the UK. Whereas gifts were traditionally physical items, many people now receive gift cards which they can instantly redeem on the day to download the kinds of items that have become highly virtual – games, music, in-play app upgrades.

“Many retailers will also have set their post-Christmas sales campaigns live on their sites by then, which are very easy to browse using the kinds of devices many people have access to – smartphones, tablets etc – during a quiet digestive moment post-Christmas dinner perhaps.”

Nitzan Tamari, vice president of marketing at SimilarWeb added: “Last year, both Christmas and Boxing Day were big days in terms of desktop and mobile web traffic in the UK; we saw over 73 million visits to the category on Christmas day alone.

“We’re waiting to see if Boxing Day beats Black Friday this year – these were the biggest shopping days in 2015 and last year we saw Black Friday win out by just under 3 million visits.”