At the start of the holiday season the statistics seemed positive with Black Friday (mainly USA) and Cyber Monday seeing growth of 16% and 13% on last year respectively. This pointed towards a favourable Christmas sales period with growth expected to continue the trend of 10% growth year on year.

Boxing Day 2010 was the one busiest day for online retailers ever with almost 14% of traffic being traced back to ecommerce activity (the lowest two points being mid and late March). This is a 4% improvement over previous years. It is speculated that this is due to snow/travel issues throughout the re-Christmas period and the impending VAT increase due to start January 2011. In fact since the 12th December online sales were already waning plummeting from a healthy 12% to 9% throughout this time however this may also be attributed to issues with pre Christmas delivery.

Top retailers during this period include:

Popular auction and classified sites eBay and Gumtree saw significant rises in traffic during this period as many people look to pass on unwanted gifts
Top retailers for the Christmas period of 2010 are as follows:

Overall sales trends looked positive with apparel and accessories peaking at around a 31% increase, closely followed by Home & garden at around 11% with Video & games following at 9%. Electronics bucked this trend with figures across the board showing an approximate 7% loss in share probably due to sales of iPad’s being purchased earlier in the year held over for Christmas presents .

Sources: Hitwise