In America, Black Friday, which is the day after US Thanksgiving, is famously the busiest shopping day of the year.
Online in the US, “Cyber Monday” – which occurred on Monday, December 1st this year – has traditionally been the busiest shopping day for online sales according to various sources such as Comscore.

As a new online retailer myself through my London based spa & wellness company Wahanda, I was braced for December 1st…until I did some research and found that in the UK, our equivalent of “Cyber Monday”, or “Mega Monday” as some press outlets were calling it, was not supposed to occur until December 8th, one full week later than the US. By the way, is there a UK equivalent of the US Black Friday? And why does our Cyber Monday occur one week later? What’s the “trigger event” in the UK?

Frosty the Snowman 2008 - Carnaby Street, London

The BBC claims that “the peak shopping hour will take place between 1300-1400 GMT when £28m may be spent online in an hour” and that ” the UK’s Christmas online retail sales could reach £13.6bn ($19.9bn)”, so in essence just over 2% of the total Christmas sales would occur in just one hour!. The £28m for one hour of sales is a pretty amazing number, because if you put it into context and assume that the holiday shopping season is about 6 weeks long (or 42 days) and that the holiday spend estimation of £13.6bn was evenly spent over that time period, then each day would represent £32m of sales. Therefore, having £28m of sales in one hour would be exceptional.

Since the beginning of December, at Wahanda we have seen sales continue to increase each week, and while “Mega Monday” was not bad, we have seen that the following Monday was even stronger and that each day has been better than the previous one. Of course being a new company it may be that we will wait until next year to really see the full effect of the Mega Monday effect. Another thing we have thought about is that people may either be spending less, or delaying their purchases as the shift more of their holiday pound online. This same effect is seen increasingly ever year in the travel industry where consumers continue to delay their summer holiday decision and purchase given the ease of booking online and the broad availability of discount offers.

Some interesting other online retail notes we have noticed from both our sales that mirror the articles in the press, and in speaking to other offline & online retailers:

• Most popular days of the week to buy online: Mon (strongest day by far), Tues, Fri (non travel products) and Sun, although in the last week as we get closer to Christmas, we have seen some encouraging sales on Wed & Thurs which previously were quiet days
• Most popular times of day to purchase:
  • Weekdays: 8.30-9.30am / lunchtime (which is the busiest by far) / 4-6pm (second strongest interval)
  • Weekends: The sales tend to be heavily weighted to hours before 5pm in November & December
• As much as 40% of turnover and profit for some online (and offline) retailers occur in the holiday season
• This I learned from my days at Yahoo! Search, but weather plays a huge role in both traffic and purchases – the worse the weather, the better the online traffic on search, and from what we have seen, the better the conversions on our online retail shop