The devil makes work for idle hands: Online shopping on Christmas Day
Traditionalists maintain that it’s the last day safe from the grasp of retailers. The figures tell a different story.
In the UK, Christmas Day is a black box when it comes to research. With all physical shops closed and people with their families, the opportunity to collect data is limited.
But, according to a study by the Centre for Retail Research, Britons are estimated to have spent almost £1bn online on Christmas Day 2017 alone. What does this mean? An undoubted opportunity has arisen for retailers to understand the motivations of consumers who choose the day to shop.
Streetbees spoke to some of their Community members on the day, and received in-the-moment feedback — including photo and video responses — to shine a light on their shopping habits.
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Christmas Day in Britain can be defined by anything from family to food, board games to boredom. But as the ubiquity and simplicity of online shopping has increased over the last few years, what once was a ghost town for retailers now represents a final, untouched frontier in terms of opportunity for growth.
How do we know this? Using a small segment of our Community as a snapshot, it’s clear the trend is upwardly mobile.
Almost half of our respondents (43%) spent some portion of their Christmas Day shopping online this year and, as their motivations indicate, this has much to do with the traditional January sales creeping further and further into the festive period.
Aside from bargain hunting (a defining factor for 64% of respondents), one of the more shocking takeaways from this snap-study was that over a quarter of people take to their devices to purchase products they expected to get as gifts. That’s one way of bypassing Santa’s list, I suppose.
It’s also clear that — in a world where attention spans are shorter than ever — the thought of remaining occupied and offline is too much to bear for almost a third of the population, with boredom also singled out as a key driver (32%).
The devil makes work for idle hands, it seems. Just 15% of respondents had designated a specific budget for Christmas Day shopping, highlighting the importance for retailers to remain top of mind as these spontaneous purchases begin to flood in.
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A quick word on our methodology: All of the data was collected by mobile and web surveys, and the 95% confidence interval is 3 percentage points.
Streetbees is an independent research platform, founded on the principle of humanising how we collect data. Join our community today by downloading the Streetbees app.
