UK shoppers to spend £5 billion online for Christmas
Howard Lake | 26 November 2005 | News
According to research by IMRG for Royal Mail, 24 million Britons are expected to spend an average of £208 online in the run-up to Christmas, driving Christmas online sales up by 40% from £3.5 billion in 2004 to £5 billion this year. With the Internet accounting for 9% of all Christmas sales and an estimated 130 million shopping deliveries, an online element to a Christmas fundraising appeal has never been more important.
According to Richard Roche, Head of Multi-Channel Retail at Royal Mail: “Half of the UK population shopped online last Christmas, spending more than £3.5 billion online.” Given the increase in online sales already underway for this Christmas, Royal Mail has published a seven-step “Retail Readiness Guide”.
Although aimed at for-profit retailers, its advice will still be relevant to trading arms of charities and some will be relevant to charities seeking online donations. Advice covers “Look back, prepare and stock up”, “educating consumers”, “Christmas in November” and “return to sender”. The advice isn’t new, but it’s a useful checklist, although one that, at this stage of the year, is a little late to be adopting from scratch.
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According to IMRG, “the latest online shopping sales figures show that online shopping is currently growing 130 times faster than high street sales.” If charities needed convincing that Christmas was a prime time to use email and the web to raise funds, this should be help make the case.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.