Father Christmas May Spend £17bn Online This Year

Holiday season is approaching, and with it the shopping spree we all know and love. The good boys and girls of Adobe analysed how consumers behaved during the Christmas shopping season in the past seven years, and have come up with a prediction on how it might play out this year.

According to their report, UK consumers will spend £17.7 billion online this Christmas, which is a seven per cent increase over last year.

The report, entitled 2015 Adobe Digital Index Online Holiday Shopping Prediction, is based on more than one trillion visits to 4,500 retail websites over the last seven years, and describes the Christmas shopping season as the entire months of November and December.

According to this report, the UK will have the largest peak online shopping day in Europe with a total projected spend of £474 million on Black Friday (November 27). On this day, the average online spend per person will be £8.06.

The majority of people choose to do their shopping online – 57 per cent of them will do it, and mostly because the prices are lower and the deals are better. Those are the results of a separate survey of 400 UK consumers.

Shopping across mobile devices remains steady and, this year, it’s predicted that almost a quarter (23 percent) of UK Christmas shopping will occur through a smartphone or tablet. This positions the UK as second in Europe when it comes to embracing mobile as a way to pay at this time of year.