You’d be forgiven for thinking that a certain Mr S Claus was buying his presents online this Monday, as the number of e-commerce orders broke all records for the busiest shopping day ever!

You’d be forgiven for thinking that a certain Mr S Claus was buying his presents online this Monday, as the number of e-commerce orders broke all records for the busiest shopping day ever! It’s been reported in the media that over £320m was spent online by UK shoppers on 3 December alone; that’s a whopping £3,700 per second. Imagine the amount of carrots and mince pies that could buy!

Our own analytics show that on Monday 3 December – or Mega Monday as it has been coined in the UK – we saw a 24% increase in orders through the FrescaCommerce Platform, compared to the busiest day last Christmas (30 November), and a 25% increase when compared to the first Monday in December last year.

To put it into perspective, between 1 December and 3 December the number of online orders increased by an amazing 70% – making it the largest number of orders ever seen through our platform, which is behind many of the world’s fastest growing and most successful e-commerce web sites – including the Aurora Fashion brands (Coast, Oasis, Warehouse), Get The Label, Karen Millen, Matalan, The Perfume Shop, and Thomas Pink.

Drilling into the shopping habits of Mega Monday shows that most people filled their e-stockings after dinner – as the hour between 21:00-22.00 was the busiest with almost twice the number of orders being placed than the typical lunchtime peak.

It’s also interesting to note just how consumers purchased their presents in 2012. IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark (which analyses e-commerce data from 150 retailers in the UK) shows that the number of people buying through a mobile device almost doubled compared to last year (21.7% vs 12.6%). The most impressive increase in this area was the percentage of online sales made on iPads which saw a monumental 194.4% increase on 2011! So instead of Mega Monday – and to pay homage to what was the most talked about topic by retailers this year – maybe it should be renamed Multichannel Monday?

         Christmas sales