UK online sales rise on holiday weekend, despite mini heatwave

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Aug 30, 2017

UK shoppers spent online enthusiastically on Monday, which was a public holiday in Britain, with PCA Predict saying e-sales rose 3% on the day, a strong performance given the hot weather that diverted many consumers from shopping into other outdoor leisure activities.

The tracking specialist said 757,308 purchases were made this Bank Holiday Monday compared to 735,907 on the equivalent day a year ago, according to a Business Matters report.

Overall online sales rose just 1% for the entire three-day weekend, but as mentioned, that is perhaps no surprise given that the UK basked in a mini heatwave after a summer that has been disappointing at best.

And the fact that online sales growth was clearly affected by the fact that consumers headed to beaches, parks and countryside, rather than shopping, it means that physical store are also likely to have suffered.

We won’t know just how much they were affected for a few weeks yet but we do know that at least online sales were in positive territory with 1.98m purchases being made in total.

The busiest single hour of the weened was between 19:00 and 20:00 on Monday when 56,000 sales happened.

Yet while Monday was the most popular shopping day overall, Saturday saw the biggest rise in online shopping. Sales volumes rose 5% with 611,208 purchases, although it remained the least busy day of the three for e-shopping.

Sunday, although a more popular e-shopping day, actually saw a 3% decline, dropping to just over 612,000 purchases as temperatures began to rise.

The weekend’s overall rise was helped by the big names in UK e-tail, including John Lewis, Amazon, Argos and Tesco, offering discounts.

Chris Boaz, Head of Marketing at PCA Predict, said: “Given the prolonged good weather over this past bank holiday weekend, online retailers did quite well to improve sales year-on-year on both Saturday and Monday. Holding [clearance] sales over this weekend, like many of the biggest online retailers did, makes a lot of sense, given it is the last bank holiday until the holiday season, which is many months away.”

PCA Predict also said that it was important that last weekend was the final one before school restarts, meaning many parents were likely making last minute purchases.