Last year we published two articles with statistics and reasoning for the benefits of an online shop and why e-commerce websites can help your business in the current economic climate (and therefore justify the cost of Internet Marketing).

1) Reasons to purchase an online shop
2) Avoid the business hearse, go ecommerce!

As an update to that article we have been doing our research for 2008’s Christmas sales figures and have found that according to the IMRG a whopping £102 million was spent online on Christmas day 2008. An increase of spending of 21% on 2007’s Xmas Day shopping figures. To break that down, thats 3.8 million users logging on to shop spending an average of £26.80 (up from £19.09 in 2007).

According to Jon Prideaux, of the payments company SecureTrading, spending in Nov 2007 was at its peak and dropped off into December. In 2008 spending online increased by 15% in December from November suggesting that surfers were holding out for the early sales that retailers carried out from the beginning of December. This is backed up with the fact that John Lewis reported its busiest ever day online on Christmas Eve when a clearance sale was kicked off and in a report from ProcewaterhouseCoopers, it was stated that 82% of retailers had sales or special offers in the run up to Xmas. Interestingly, Play.com were the only retailers in the report to report the traditional date of December the 8th as their busiest of the season.

In an e-commerce article prior to Xmas, PoLR suggested that an e-commerce cart needed to be ready with Jan sales and offers from boxing day, with figures like this we’d like to take slap ourselve on the wrist and adjust that date to Christmas day (at the latest, it would seem!)

Finally, a TalkTalk suvey showed that 4 million Brits would be happy to wait until the 27th Dec for their Xmas day celebrations if it could save them as little as £100! Xmas shopping in the sales…another good reason for putting off seeing the in-laws for as long as possible!

Related posts:

1. Why you need to plan your Christmas marketing now.
2. E-commerce Survey – Who shops for what online?
3. Popular blog posts 2008

E-commerce christmas shopping online, ecommerce 2008 figures