Bumper Boxing Day sees UK records broken, as 13 million hours are spent shopping online

It was a bumper Boxing Day for e-commerce in the UK, with a whopping 13 million hours spent shopping online yesterday, making it the biggest post-Christmas-Day buying bonanza ever.

As Experian Hitwise reports, UK Internet shoppers broke records yesterday, with retail websites receiving 96 million Internet visits on Boxing Day, which is 40% more than the 68 million visits notched up on the same day last year, and making it the single biggest online shopping day ever in the UK.

The Boxing Day success follows the increased Christmas Day online shopping, with December 25th seeing 62.8 million UK Internet visits arriving on retail websites, accounting for 1 in every 8 UK website visits. It seems the momentum carried on all the way through to Boxing Day, which fell on a Monday this year and could further explain the sharp rise in online shopping this festive period.

Judging by this graph, Web traffic to retail websites peaks each Monday, so it seems that it’s a combination of an increased uptake in online shopping, the holiday period and the fact that Boxing Day was on a Monday that has led to the massive increase this year.

Last month we reported that eBay and Amazon’s busiest days of the year were to be on the 4th and 5th of December in the build-up to Christmas, and their post-Christmas popularity saw them take the top two e-commerce spots in the UK:

Tesco and Tesco Direct jumped from 24th and 25th place respectively to 14th and 15th between Christmas Day and Boxing Day, with consumers taking advantage of special offers on food and drink in the run-up to New Year.

With millions of UK shoppers either off work or on a reduced working schedule over the festive period, there’s still plenty of time for consumers to spend their Christmas money, though the massive Boxing Day spike is unlikely to be bettered this side of New Year. In fact, we may have to wait until December 26th 2012 before we see this record broken again.