UK Retail Update: Post-Christmas 2007 Analysis

Boxing Day the most important day for online Christmas shopping. Boxing Day was the busiest day by market share of Internet visits for online shopping in 2007, and the Shopping & Classifieds industry received more visits during Boxing Day 2007 than in both 2005 and 2006. Post-Christmas searches for ‘sales’ trebled. There were more searches for ‘boxing day sales’ in December 2007 than for ‘january sales’ in December 2006, with Play.com receiving a quarter of all traffic from the term ‘sale’.
High-street retailers overtook pure-play online retailers two months earlier than in 2006. Traffic to the websites of high-street retailers previously overtook pure-play retailers only over the Christmas and January sale periods. However, high-street retailers overtook pure-play websites in September 2007, and increased their lead during the peak holiday shopping weeks.
Supermarket websites increased online market share by 2.2% in 2007. One of the main drivers of supermarket websites’ growth online was sales of non-food items, such as electrical equipment and entertainment products.
Nintendo Wii, Apple iPhone and digital photo frames were the hot products for Christmas 2007. Nintendo Wii accounted for six in every ten searches for a games console product during November 2007, and there were twice as many searches for ‘wii’ than ‘ipod’ and ‘iphone’ combined. Searches for ‘digital photo frames’ outstripped those for ‘digital camera’.***
Women prefer to search for electrical products at department stores instead of specialist electronics retailers. Men are more likely to visit specialist electronics stores, while women prefer department stores and big high street names.
Searches for ‘vouchers’ reached two-year high. The most searched-for branded voucher was ‘tesco vouchers’, followed by iTunes and Amazon. There was a noticeable growth in vouchers for pure-play online retailers in 2007.
Boxing Day (26 December) was the busiest day for online shopping based on market share of visits in the UK over the Christmas period, and indeed the whole of 2007. In order to compare 2007 to previous years, Hitwise created an index of UK Internet visits to the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds industry, using 1 November each year as the base (illustrated in the chart below).
Not only was Boxing Day the busiest day in 2007, but it was busier than in both 2005 and 2006. Indeed, the importance of the day after Christmas has been increasing steadily over the last two years. Another interesting thing about this graph is the position of the pre-Christmas peak. In 2006, it moved closer to Christmas (10 December) as retailers put more effort into ensuring on-time delivery and shoppers’ confidence improved. However, in 2007 the peak moved back to the first weekend in December.

Searches for sales trebled in 2007
The number of UK consumers searching for post-Christmas sales online more than trebled during the 2007 holiday period. There were 249% more UK Internet searches for the term ‘sales’ for the week ending 29 December 2007 than for the comparable week in 2006. There was also a 200% increase in searches for the term ‘sale’ over the same period.
The post-Christmas online sales are becoming more important to retailers every year. Online holiday shopping started earlier than ever in 2007, but a sluggish last couple of weeks before Christmas also forced many retailers to discount goods and start their sales earlier. For some online retailers, the January sales started on Christmas Day. There were more searches for ‘boxing day sales’ in 2007 than there were for ‘january sales’ in 2006.

Play.com top recipient of traffic from ‘sale’
Play.com, received over a quarter of all UK Internet traffic from searches for the terms ‘sales’ and ‘sale’ for the 4 weeks ending 29 December 2007. As a result, the entertainment retailer saw its market share of all UK Internet visits increase by 15% between 22 and 29 December 2007 (compared to the average for all Shopping & Classifieds websites of 13%), when it became the 4th most visited Shopping & Classifieds website in the UK.