With only a few shopping weeks left until Christmas, consumers have entered into a festive frenzy in order to purchase all their gifts before the day arrives. Yet, due to the boom in popularity of internet shopping, it appears that shoppers wish to be more organised than ever before to guarantee their purchases arrive in plenty of time to be wrapped and sent off to their final destinations.
Monday proved to be the busiest shopping day of all time in terms of internet retail, as many e-retailers chose to halve the price of their stock in order to attract massive numbers of consumers to their sites. This proved to be so popular that a record £10,000 per second was made in internet transactions, with a total of 115 million hits recorded by web stores between 9am and 9pm on that day.
Furthermore, the full amount spent online by consumers within the 12 hour timeframe has been estimated at a massive £465 million – with the total spent on online shopping during the month of December now expected to number well above £5 billion.
The rush on the 3rd of December may be explained by research from Which? as the consumer group discovered that 80 per cent of participants questioned made at least one Christmas gift purchase in 2011. Unfortunately, one in 12 of these online shoppers failed to receive their purchase in time for Christmas – ensuring that millions will buy earlier this year to avoid disappointment.
Consumer Focus also helped to fuel the Mega Monday fire by warning that the bad weather expected to strike in the run-up to Christmas may cause delays in the postal service. It has advised consumers to make sure their online orders are in in plenty of time for Christmas, especially as some parts of the country have already experienced flooding and snow this December.
Internet retailers will currently be battling to get all customer orders organised, packaged and sent out, with many stores having had to take on additional staff at warehouses in order to cope with the growing demand for internet shopping.
Marks & Spencer is just one retailer which has seen a growing demand for its internet business, resulting in the successful chain hiring 800 extra staff members to lend support to employees in its UK distribution centres. Furthermore, the number of workers in its e-commerce call centre has been doubled as anxious shoppers inundate the switchboard with queries and requests.
Multi-channel development director at Marks & Spencer, David Walmsley, says; “For months, we have been planning behind the scenes to make sure we’re fully prepared to manage the huge uplift in orders we are expecting.
“Christmas can be a hectic time for our customers so we’ve brought in extra support in our warehouses, customer services and in stores.”
Marks and Spencer is not the only high street retailer putting increasing faith in the internet aspect of business, however, as online sales are now becoming the sectors showing greatest growth for traditional leaders such as John Lewis and Tesco.
In fact, earlier this week John Lewis posted a record week for internet retailing, with an astonishing £37.9 million made in total in sales from its website.
There is good news, too, for electrical retailers who have suffered in the past few years due to consumers cutting back on non-essential spending. Tablet computers for both adults and children are expected to be the most popular gifts this year, with the Kindle Fire HD, iPad Mini and InnoPad 2 topping the list of the most searched-for items online on Mega Monday.
Digital insight manager at Experian, James Murray, believes that this Christmas will be, in his words, a ‘record-breaker for online retail,’ outstripping 2011 on all fronts.
“The current market trends suggest that in the UK, Monday December 3 will be the biggest pre-Christmas day for online retail, with an estimated 115 million visits to online retail outlets and a massive 15 million hours spent online shopping on this day alone.”
It seems, then, that internet retailing is poised to be the success story of Christmas 2012. The question now must be whether John Lewis and Marks & Spencer’s high street equivalents will be able to come close to matching the success of their online counterparts.
Did you participate in the online extravaganza that was Mega Monday, or do you prefer to shop on the high street? What do you think next year holds for both? Tell us below.
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