2014 Black Friday, Cyber and Manic Mondays set to break all UK records
Black Friday became a weekend-long shopping spree yesterday as consumers were set to spend about £650m during Cyber Monday.
Yesterday marked another pre-Christmas internet shopping frenzy, and industry body IMRG estimated that about £451,000 was spent per minute – making it the busiest online shopping day ever and a 26 per cent increase on last year.
Market analysts Mintel suggested that Britain’s total internet Christmas shopping bill would be £4.7bn, with shoppers in London and the south east spending around a third of that.
Chaos and fights erupted in shops on Black Friday as buyers rushed to snap up bargains. In some cases the police had to be called in to restore order, and many websites of top retailers encountered problems due to traffic, including John Lewis, Tesco, Argos and Topshop.
And it’s not over yet. Next Monday is Manic Monday, and Experian believes that the spend will be £470,000 a minute as some shoppers leave their purchasing to later in the month as they have more confidence in pre-Christmas delivery.
A spokesperson for MasterCard told City A.M. that the credit card firm expected Christmas online expenditure to be £12bn, “of which £4.32bn will be via mobile devices as compared with £2.9bn last year”.