Online shoppers will spend more than £1 million every minute during the upcoming ‘Cyber Monday’ sales, experts predict.
The 24-hour event, which this year is set to take place on Monday December 1, traditionally sees a number of retailers apply significant discounts to popular items. Technology giants like Apple and Amazon tend to lead the way, with savings of around 40 per cent on some products.
While it’s normal for sales to increase, data released by Hitachi Personal Finance suggests 2014 will be a record year, The company’s analysts predict that a whopping £1.5 billion will be spent throughout the day – which would represent an increase of ten per cent on 2013’s figure.
The new report comes after IMRG predicted another rise in online retail activity for the year as a whole, retail-week.com notes. The e-retail association is expecting £107 billion to be spent by the end of 2014, making for growth of 17 per cent over 2013.
According to Hitachi’s head of retail finance, Lisa Harrison, the reasons for the increases are clear. She was quoted by retailgazette.co.uk as saying: “With 21% of retail sales now taking place online, we expect digital sales to break the £100bn threshold this year.
“A lot of this growth is coming from mobile channels, with sales over smartphones and tablets having grown by 138% in 2013, compared to the previous year.”
Ms Harrison went on to suggest that shoppers are likely to find better deals by choosing e-retailers over their bricks-and-mortar counterparts.
Author: Graeme Parton
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