Over the last few days the UK Internet population have been prolific online, in one of the busiest post-Christmas periods ever.

Boxing Day was the busiest day of the year for online retailers again this year, but the sales have continued to perform ahead of last year’s figures with 27 December being the second biggest online retail day of 2010.

Post Christmas visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category have been significantly better this season than in previous years, mainly because consumers weren’t able to get all their shopping done with the pre-Christmas snow, but also because of the impending VAT increase in January.

UK Internet visits to online retailers on 27 December were 4.5% higher this year than the same day last year. On 28 December traffic levels returned to normal in line with last year, but this has been a record year for Christmas Day, Boxing Day and 27 December in terms of online traffic to retailers.

The biggest growth between 27 December and Boxing Day was on eBay, perhaps with unwanted Christmas presents being put up for auction. After eBay the biggest winners of the 27 December traffic were John Lewis, Tesco and Groupon.
You can follow Hitwise UK on Twitter for the latest updates and don’t forget we’re holding our post Christmas retail webinar on Friday 7 January which you can sign up for now.