Monday was ‘biggest ever online shopping day’

Retail trading patterns – both online and offline – are changing considerably this year, as new, fast-paced multi-channel strategies emerge, and retailers instantly react to competitor’s tactics.  

For example, last Thursday, many retailers piled into ‘20% Off Day’, creating a huge spike of traffic and trade on the high street and on websites.

James Roper, CEO at IMRG, said: “Monday is almost always the biggest shopping day of the week, and Monday’s in December are usually huge.  It was widely assumed that yesterday’s fall in VAT, from 17.5% to 15%, would create a considerable shopping surge, due pent up demand caused by shoppers waiting for the lower rate.  But it just didn’t happen.  Many of the smart e-retailers had already passed on the lower rate as soon as it was announced.”

Jon Prideaux, deputy chief executive of payments service provider SecureTrading, added:  “Monday was the largest day for UK e-commerce ever in terms of transactions, but value was flat.  Transaction volumes were 3% higher than the 2007 record but value is almost exactly the same as last year.  The size of the general Christmas peak is smaller: normally it’s 85% above an average day, this year it’s only 68%.”

Chris Russell, a director of eDigitalResearch which monitors visitor traffic to major e-retail sites, added:  “We saw the same trend with regard to the number of consumers visiting online shopping sites – it was not the year’s traffic peak.  Yesterday’s traffic was just 32% higher than the average October day, compared to a rise of 45% for the first Monday (3^rd) of December 2007, and 83% on Monday 4^th December 2006.  This year may be very different;  we expect that if there is a continuation of the strong promotional activity that we saw last week by high street retailers, both in store and online, there may be a significant change in the overall pattern of online traffic for 2008.”