4.4 million UK people bought goods online on Christmas Day 2007, spending £84m and marking a 269 per cent increase on last year, new research reveals.
The data is collected from a sample of over 250 million page views per month from UK retailers which have its survey code installed on their websites.
Chris Russell, director of eDigital Research, believes that this year's web traffic will follow a similar pattern to last year's, when a steep increase in traffic to retail sites was seen in the days after Christmas, reaching a pinnacle on 27 December.
"Up to 20 per cent of all high street sales are preceded by online research. In the Christmas sales we could see even more people turning to the web before hitting the high street to get a head start and cut out some of the leg work," said Russell.
Source: Robert Jaques, vnunet.com02 Jan 2008