This Monday was predicted to be the zenith of the Christmas trading peak online, but the take away from 2009 is that retailers must make their own luck online.

This Monday was predicted to be the zenith of the Christmas trading peak online, but the take away from 2009 is that retailers must make their own luck online.

If there was a better bet for what Monday this week would bring than the peak of online trading, it was that my inbox would be full of news and opinions from those paid to promote the online industry. Sure enough facts and figures on the success of the day have been flooding in ever since.

So I can knowledgeably inform you that 1-2pm on Monday was the busiest hour, with £33 million spent in those 60 minutes. The absolute peak was 1.43pm, when UK retailers generated £1.4m in just 60 seconds.

Retailers including Play, House of Fraser, Tesco and Argos all achieved 100% availability that day. And everyone will be relieved to know that Amazon is not perfect; with 98.6% uptime and page loading times of 2.38 seconds on Monday it was outperformed by several high street retailers.

That busiest minute of Monday recorded sales that were 61% up on the same time next year. This figure could be easily manipulated to show that the online economy is going full-steam ahead. Hang onto your hats and continue to enjoy the ride.

But clearly most retailers who have been selling online for a few years now are starting to see the market mature. Why else have so many opened their sites up to international consumers in the past 12 months?

So while it is great news that they underlying internet infrastructure retailers will have been fine-tuning over the summer is coping with these new highs, Monday’s big numbers can’t hide the industry’s even bigger challenges.

The competition for market share on online will get messy next year. The web is a great place for quickly executing tactics - newly designed home pages, better merchandising algorithyms, social commerce, interactive customer service and the like. And expect improved fulfilment and delivery options to be another battle ground as retailers seek differentiation online.

While the market is maturing, the New Year is likely to see ongoing web development headaches.