The number of UK consumers searching for post-Christmas sales online more than trebled during the 2007 holiday period. There were 249% more UK internet searches for the term ‘sales’ for the week ending 29th December 2007 than for the comparable week in 2006. There was also a 200% increase in searches for the term ‘sale’ over the same period.

The post-Christmas online sales are becoming more and more important to retailers every year. Online holiday shopping started earlier then ever in 2007, but a sluggish last couple of weeks before Christmas also forced many retailers to discount goods and start their sales earlier. For some online retailers, the January sales started on Christmas Day. As we mentioned last week, Boxing Day was the busiest online shopping day of 2007, and there were almost more searches for ‘boxing day sales’ this year than there were for ‘january sales’ last year.

Play.com, which today anounced a 24% increase in Q4 sales, received over a quarter of all UK Internet traffic from searches for the terms ‘sales’ and ‘sale’ for the 4 weeks ending 29th December 2007. As a result, the entertainment retailer saw its market share of all UK Internet visits increase by 15% between the 22nd and 29th December (compared to average for all Shopping and Classifieds site of 13%), when it became the 4th most visited Shopping and Classifieds website in the UK.

The second and third most popular websites receiving traffic from UK Internet searches for ‘sale’ were Tesco Direct and Littlewoods. Meanwhile, ‘next sale’ was the most popular search term containing the word ‘sale’ for 4 weeks ending 29th December, and was the second fastest moving search during the same period.