“Boxing Day sales failed to reverse the trend towards online seen through the rest of December and make up for flagging high street trade. On 26 and 27 December total online sales were up a huge 34% year on year, compared to offline which was down 2%” said director Simon Smith.  

 

“The extra Saturday before Christmas was expected to give offline a big advantage this year, especially as online sales dropped off quickly in the week before but this made little difference to the overall picture. Quantium’s data shows that some product categories saw as much as 40% of all sales were made online in the months leading up to Christmas, a growth trend we predict will continue, differently across retail categories.”

 

The results show that not only are consumers increasingly relying on internet purchases much closer to Christmas, the low prices, convenience and range offered online is diminishing the appeal of even the big discounts from Boxing Day sales. Clearly online retailers were also competing hard with seasonal discounting too. 

 

“This is not universally bad news for established ‘multi-channel’ retailers, because the best of them are now making over 15% of their sales online, however many of the big names are still way behind and missing out on the big shift in consumer behaviour.”

 

Quantium bases its analysis on its Market Blueprint database of anonymised spend transaction data from over 2.5 million Australians.