British shoppers step up online bargain hunting in week after Christmas

British shoppers flocked to the web to search for bargains in the days following Christmas, according to web measurement firm Hitwise.

Searches for the term “sales” jumped 249% in the week of Dec. 22-29 over the comparable week last year and 200% for the term “sale,” Hitwise says. Traffic to UK shopping and classified sites increased 13% over the same week last year, Hitwise says.

“The post-Christmas online sales are becoming more and more important to retailers every year,” says Robin Goad, Hitwise UK director of research. “Online holiday shopping started earlier then ever this year, 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.” Goad notes that the day after Christmas, known as Boxing Day in the UK, “was the busiest online shopping day of 2007, and there were almost more searches for ‘boxing day sales’ this year than there were for ‘january sales’ last year.”

Traffic to UK retail web sites on Boxing Day was up 1.3% over last year, and was 7.1% higher than the second-heaviest online shopping day in the UK this year, which was Sunday, Dec. 2. The top 50 web sites of bricks-and-mortar retailers attracted 5.39% of the traffic on Boxing Day, compared with 2.37% of the traffic for the 50 leading web-only UK merchants.

On Christmas Day itself, 4.4 million British shoppers spent £84 million (US$167 million) online, 269% more than was spent last year, says online retail trade organization Interactive Media in Retail Group. “A new development we saw this year was retailers such as Argos encouraging shoppers to shop online on Christmas Day, where the sales started a day earlier than traditional stores,” says Chris Russell, director of eDigital Research, a web measurement firm that helped put together the sales estimate. “Combined with the expected sale of ‘top-ups’ for Christmas gifts online, i.e., those who have received an iPod for Christmas logging on to buy songs on iTunes, online retailers had a busier Christmas Day in 2007 than ever before.”

As much as 20% of sales in UK stores are now preceded by Internet research, Russell adds. “In the Christmas sales we could see even more people turning to the Internet before hitting the high street to get a head start and cut out some of the leg work,” he says.