Cyber Monday Hikes UK Online Sales By Over 21%

According to statistics from IBM, Cyber Monday hiked UK online sales by 21.5%, compared to the busiest e-commerce day in 2010.

Cyber Monday, which was 28 November this year, is considered the beginning of Christmas shopping and the day with most intense traffic online.

In addition, figures from IBM’s Coremetrics Benchmark analysis point out that mobile traffic increased three times and reached 12% of all traffic, whereas purchases made from mobile devices accounted for almost 10% of all transactions this year.

Consumers used their iPhones in nearly 5% of all mobile traffic, while 3.5% of mobile access to the web came from iPads. The biggest growth in market share was registered by Android, which accounted for 3.3% of UK mobile traffic, up 700% from 0.4% year on year.

Traffic from social sites remained relatively low, with less than 1% of all purchases, most of which came from Facebook.

Another extremely busy day for e-commerce was 5 December, which had high expectations, with predictions for new record spend rates. Some £19m were expected to be spent every hour, meaning that UK consumers were likely to have spent £456m in 24 hours. Official figures from 5 December sales have not been revealed yet though.