So if you’re not already, within the next couple of days you’ll be shutting up your warehouse for a well deserved Christmas break. Are you planning to open up between Christmas and New year though, because if you keep your website and marketplace listings like you may well need to be back at work.
IMRG, supported by SimilarWeb data, estimates that total spend on online retail sites on Christmas Day will reach £805m, a +10.1% increase on the £728m spent on the same day in 2015. The shops may be shut but online never closes and there will be plenty of buyers with money to spend.
Justin Opie, managing director, IMRG explains “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 to download the kinds of items that have become highly virtual – games, music, in-play app upgrades etc. 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.”
Boxing Day, with many high street retailers open again, is also estimated to get close to being a billion-pound online shopping day, with total spend forecast to hit £984m – a 15% increase on Boxing Day 2015 when spend was estimated to be £856m. As a big online shopping day, this would still put Boxing Day behind Black Friday – where spend in 2016 was estimated to be £1.23bn.
Following the two traditional holiday days, the 27th will also be a Bank Holiday so Wednesday will be the first day you can ship goods sold over the Christmas period. If you’ve not already informed your regular courier of which days you need a pick up, make sure you catch them before you leave for Christmas.
