Online retailers looked to cash in on the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy with Cyber Monday deals, only to find last week’s Black Friday had lured even larger numbers of web shoppers.
An estimated £810m was spent online by British shoppers on Friday, according to internet retail experts IMRG, a figure that eclipsed the £650m splurge predicted for Cyber Monday, and potentially means Boxing Day has been usurped as the biggest shopping day of the year once store sales are taken into account.
According to data from online shopping tracker Postcode Anywhere, some 267,370 orders had been logged by 6pm on Monday, which was well up on last year’s event, but behind the 404,835 in the bag at the same point on Black Friday.
“The Black Friday sales saw Britain’s most savvy shoppers logging online in the early hours to secure the best bargains and spend their cash,” said Guy Mucklow, Postcode Anywhere’s chief executive. “It is clear that because many of those deals spanned the payday weekend, many shoppers were already spent by the time Cyber Monday landed.”
Cyber Monday was a term coined in 2005 by American industry body the National Retail Federation to encourage people to shop online. After retailers revved up deals, within five years it had become the busiest online shopping day, coinciding in Britain with the first Monday in December when many have received their last pre-Christmas pay. The name was also a nod to online shopping being done at work.
After studying the reaction to discounts offered by the likes of Amazon, John Lewis and Currys, IMRG thinks Britons logged on and spent £810m on Friday, well over its original estimate of £555m.
Despite the estimated £650m spend on Monday, the day has lost some of its potency as improved delivery times and click and collect services mean that more customers are leaving their orders to the last minute.
“We expect today to be phenomenally busy and for it to get even more hectic later,” said Lucy Robertson, general manager of Amazon’s Peterborough warehouse, which houses some 10m products. “Cyber Monday has always been our biggest single day for sales but the growing success of Black Friday illustrates that it has become a much anticipated date as the nation prepares for the festive season.”
Amazon is said to have introduced Black Friday to the UK in 2010 and, with 5.5m products ordered on Friday, its record of shipping 4.1m products – set on Cyber Monday last year – has been broken.
The website’s customer “wishlists” provide a snapshot of what people are eyeing up for their annual spending spree, with the Barbie Endless Curls doll, Disney Frozen ice skating Anna and Elsa dolls and Lego Star Wars among this year’s most wanted toys.
Staff will be working flat out at its eight “fulfilment centres”, which close only on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. “We start planning for next year’s Christmas on 27 December,” said Robertson.
With some websites struggling to cope with the number of shoppers, IMRG calculated that the number of visits to retail websites reached 181m on Black Friday – nearly 50% more than its estimate of 124m.
Tina Spooner, chief information officer at IMRG, said the number of people logging on was “staggering” and another milestone in the growth of internet retailing: “The numbers are amazing but having seen the mayhem on the high street it doesn’t surprise me that figures are higher than we expected.”
The spending blowout is expected to be confirmed on Tuesday when John Lewis provides its latest Christmas update, which will offer the high street’s first hard sales figures for Black Friday.
Nick Bubb, independent retail analyst, predicts John Lewis’s sales could be up as much as 20% in the week leading up to Saturday thanks to a strong run on electrical goods as shoppers flocked to buy discounted tablets and televisions.
Bubb predicted that the chain’s weekly sales could have broken through £175m, which would be higher than its record breaking Christmas week last year when sales hit £164m.
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