IMRG – Christmas Day online sales forecast

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.

Boxing Day 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.

This is of course notwithstanding any potential ban on shops being open on Boxing Day (following recent debates on this issue), which would most likely massively increase site traffic to online retail sites on that day.

Justin Opie, managing director at IMRG, said:

“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.”

Nitzan Tamari, VP Marketing at SimilarWeb, said:

“Last year, both Christmas and Boxing Day were big days in terms of desktop and mobile web traffic in the UK; we saw over 73 million 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 three million visits.”