Christmas and Boxing Day break online retail records

By Staff, brandrepublic.com, Monday, 27 December 2010 08:45PM

Online retailers enjoyed a welcome boost following a December blighted by weather-related disruption with Christmas Day achieving record figures and Boxing Day proving to be the busiest online shopping day of the year.

Traditional High Street brands dominated the UK's top 20 most visited retail outlets, in figures from Experian Hitwise, joined by online giants including eBay, Amazon and iTunes.  

Hitwise recorded and 32% increase in traffic from Christmas Eve to Christmas day.  

Boxing Day managed to top this by 26%, recording a peak in traffic 12% higher than the previous busiest day, 5 December.  

Experian said department stores and fashion retailers accounted for 13 of the top 20 most visited retail websites in the UK yesterday, with consumer electronics and entertainment sectors also performing well.

Boxing Day's most popular UK retail websites by share of visits

 

Rank	Website	Share (%)
1	eBay UK	9.96
2	Amazon UK	7.02
3	Argos	3.53
4	Next	2.19
5	Your M&S	1.98
6	John Lewis	1.89
7	Currys	1.81
8	Debenhams	1.71
9	Play.com	1.71
10	Comet	1.40
11	Tesco	1.10
12	Tesco Direct	1.04
13	River Island	0.86
14	PC World	0.84
15	Amazon.com	0.80
16	New Look	0.79
17	House of Fraser	0.77
18	Topshop.com	0.76
19	Asos	0.74
20	Game	0.71

 

Source: Experian Hitwise

The Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) predicted consumers would part with up to £153m on Christmas Day, a period traditionally absolved from festive spending fever.

High Street stores are also enjoying good business. The Mirror reported up to £2.5bn was spent at packed stores and shopping centres across the UK yesterday alone.

The British Retail Consortium estimates £5billion will be spent in the sales this week, though today it warned retailers were bracing themselves for a difficult year ahead, with the majority predicting a decline on this year's levels.

This article was first published on brandrepublic.com