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Hitwise Intelligence - James Murray - UK

Analyst Weblog

« 8 Internet Predictions for 2012 | Christmas Day 2011 warms up shoppers for Boxing Day »

Boxing Day set to be biggest ever day for online retail

December 23, 2011

Following on from the success of our predictions around Cyber Monday a couple of weeks ago we are predicting a record breaking 95 million UK Internet visits to online retailers on Boxing Day (26 December) this year.

Historically Boxing Day has always been the single biggest day of the year for online retailers as consumers want to spend their Christmas money, exchange unwanted presents and browse ahead of the post-Christmas sales. Last year there were 80.5 million visits to online retailers on Boxing Day but this year we are expecting 95 million visits, an 18% uplift year-on-year.

Boxing Day falls on a Monday this year which is significant because Mondays have consistently been the biggest day of the week for online traffic to retail websites in the run up to Christmas this year. By contrast Saturdays have consistently been the lowest point of each week for total visits. Benchmarking Hitwise data against Experian Footfall data we can see that Saturday also corresponds to the biggest day of the week for offline high street shopping.

We are often asked if online shopping is having a negative effect on high street retail. However, our data suggests that far from cannibalising high street retail figures, online compliments the high street. Multi-channel retailers who can blend their online and offline marketing are more likely to see traffic on their website and Footfall in their stores.

One of the predictions we made in our 12 Insights of Christmas blog was that people would start searching for sales earlier than ever before and certainly looking at last year’s figures we can see that searches for all ‘sales’ terms start to increase in the week ending 18 December.

At the peak of searches last year, 0.9% of all searches conducted in the UK included the word ‘sale’ or ‘sales’. The word cloud below indicates the top sales search term variations.

As you can see the stand-out sales are for department stores Next, Debenhams, M&S and John Lewis, but there is also significant search volumes for generic terms like ‘boxing day sales’.

We will be talking more about the Christmas online retail trends in the final part of our trilogy of webinars which is being held on Friday 6 January at noon. In the meantime you can keep up to date with the latest data trends on Twitter or on the blog.

Tweet Posted by James Murray at 09:51 AM | (0)
In Categories Shopping and Classifieds