UK - Boxing Day retail proves to be 'damp squib' with 17% drop in online purchases

Boxing Day has lost its positioning as the premier shopping date of the Christmas season with Black Friday now the key date in the sales and bargain-hunting calendar.

The expected carnival of retail on Boxing Day saw online shoppers making 17% fewer purchases than they did a year ago.

Consumers got online in search of a bargain on Boxing Day at about twice the rate that they did throughout Christmas Eve and made five times as many purchases in the process.

However, the country's biggest online retailers saw their conversion rates - the percentage of online shoppers that actually made a purchase from a website - drop from a total of 3% on Boxing Day in 2013 to 2.5% in 2014.

Meanwhile, the conversion rate on Black Friday - the 28th November, reached 2.7% as British consumers went looking for deals. The number of people spending money online was also higher than on Boxing Day - almost 79% more internet shoppers bought something on an ecommerce website on Black Friday than on the 26th December.

As a result many retailers such as Currys are already preparing for Black Friday next year and using their websites to urge customers to mark out the 27th November 2015 in their diaries.

Though Boxing Day lost out to Black Friday in terms of online purchases, UK shoppers still flocked to the internet in massive numbers looking for deals once Christmas was done. Qubit's clients - a list that includes Topshop owner Arcadia Group, DFS and Shop Direct Group - saw a total of 17,657,174 online visitors throughout the day with just under half a million people making 824,152 individual purchases.

Last updated: Apr 7, 2020 at 12:08 pm CDT