Online at Christmas in numbers

The figures are out for the online holiday spend..

According to econsultancy US online retail sales reached USD$24.8bn for the Christmas period, (Forrester Research puts it at USD$27bn). You may be happy to know that along with Black Friday’s and Cyber Monday’s, there was a Green Monday (December 14th 2009). Although econsultancy’s Graham Charlton suggests that Tuesday 15th December 2009 could also be referred to as Green Tuesday because of the record spend of USD$913M in comparison to Cyber Monday (November 30th 2009) spend of USD$887M (this was an increase on 2008 Cyber Monday spend of USD$846M)

UK e-tailers reported an average 3.7 items purchased per order compared to 2.7 items per order in 2008. NMA reports that 4m britons spent over £100M online on Christmas day alone, with Boxing day being the busiest day for UK e-tailers.

Popular retail websites for the period in the UK include eBay UK, Amazon UK, Argos, Next, Play.com, M&S, John Lewis, whilst the Apple store was most popular in Australia.

IMRG reports that Ocado experienced a 49% increase in sales reaching £8.9M, where they delivered 3.5 million items to 42,000 customers. Whilst John Lewis had an increase in customer volume both online and instore experiencing a 23% increase in online sales, with their online shoppers making a purchase every 10 seconds on Christmas day!

Were there alot of John Lewis vouchers given out as presents in 2009? Or as Hitwise’s Robin Goad reports that the change in VAT rate may have prompted shoppers to spend, UK internet searches registered an increase in ‘VAT rate change’ search term during December prior to the VAT rate returning to 17.5% on 1st January 2010, a healthy Christmas sounds like a good way to start your New Year if your an etailer.

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