Consumers surge online on “Mega Monday”

Monday December 8th 2008 was the biggest online shopping day this year with sales volumes up 18% and values up 14% as consumers flocked online to purchase their Christmas presents.

A combination of continuing consumer confidence in online shopping and heavy retailer promotion has seen sales increase year-on-year by 14% to around £320m, beating last Monday’s peak by £20m.

But it wasn’t the busiest e-retail day of the year, as expected. Research from IMRG member Hitwise saw traffic to retail sites reach a peak of 12.32% of all UK visits online, making Monday only the third-biggest traffic day to the sector, despite the high sales volumes. This suggests that consumers are busy at the weekend researching gifts both in the High Street and online before purchasing via the internet on Monday.

James Roper CEO of IMRG commented, “Online sales are holding up well, considering the economic conditions, with both volumes and values significantly higher than last year. The ratio of researching to buying is also much greater, and researching started earlier this year, as Christmas shoppers work hard to track down the best deals. Delivery companies are in sparkling Christmas form as most had geared up for higher volumes than they are receiving so far, so there is plenty of time left for shoppers to bag Yuletide bargains. We may even see next Monday being bigger still, which would be the first time ever that the third Monday in December marked the year’s peak.”

Jon Prideaux, deputy chief executive of payments service provider SecureTrading, comments: “The data we are seeing indicates that, yesterday, Monday December 8th is likely to be the largest online shopping day of the year. We are seeing an 18% increase in the number of transactions, while the value of transactions is up approximately 14% across the market as a whole. The averages conceal that a significant number of retailers are facing a bleak Christmas with sales below last year - for others it's a bonanza with sales up very sharply. It is the first time that anyone can really say that about the e-commerce space where things generally just seem to get better and better for everyone. This Christmas is sorting out the wheat from the chaff!”

Chris Russell, Director at eDigitalResearch adds: “After monitoring traffic hits over the past 24 hours, we have identified that yesterday’s activity was actually a shade lower than last week’s figures for the last few days. This would suggest an online ‘hangover’ from the attention created by Marks and Spencer’s recent internet discount days has bumped the traditional assumptions that yesterday was the biggest online retail day of the year. This means that retailers can no longer rely on traditional forecasting in an increasingly changing online retail sphere. Despite this, combining our figures with the transaction data, our results suggest that there has been growing consumer confidence in buying online and an increased propensity for shoppers to purchase online.”