Christmas Day e-tail to top £800m, boosted by gift cards says IMRG

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Dec 15, 2016

UK shoppers will spend £805m online on Christmas Day, IMRG forecast on Thursday. The prediction, based on e-tail sales data from IMRG and e-tail site traffic volume data from SimilarWeb, suggests that December 25 shopping activity will rise by as much as 10.1%.

And Boxing Day (December 26) will see both an even bigger total and an even bigger rise with sales predicted to be up 15% to £984m.

However, both those days would still fall behind Black Friday’s £1.23bn spend. That’s assuming the UK government doesn’t ban Boxing Day stores openings. If that happened it would most likely boost online turnover as bored, bargain-hungry Britons would likely turn to the internet to get their shopping fix.

Justin Opie, managing director, IMRG said the large amount to be spend on December 25 has been boosted by trend towards gift cards: “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.

“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, VP Marketing at SimilarWeb: “Last year, both Christmas and Boxing Day were big days in terms of desktop and mobile web traffic in the UK; we saw over 73m 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 3m visits.”