UK consumers save online shopping for Boxing day
New research from Experian Hitwise shows that Boxing day was the busiest day for online retailers in the UK, with visits to websites around 12% higher than before Christmas.
In the run up to the holidays, 5 December saw the highest numbers hitting online shopping sites, but even more shoppers decided to log in post-Christmas with the second-busiest day falling on 27 December.
The boost has been put down to early January sales and the VAT increase, which came into effect on 4 January.
Multi-channel retailers saw higher levels of traffic than pure play outfits, according to BizReport. “On Christmas Day the websites of high street retailers received 103% more traffic than their online only counterparts; by Boxing Day that gap had increased to 123%.This points not only to the strong sale brands of the big high street names such as Next and Debenhams, but also to a lot browse-before-you-buy behaviour,” said Robin Goad, research director at Hitwise.
A separate study found that only 5% of Christmas shoppers said a social network influenced their decision to visit one of the top 40 retailers’ websites. According to ClickZ, social media failed to be a key driver for online shoppers this Christmas, although search engines did a slightly better job of pushing consumers to retailers’ websites.