This weekend will be the last Bank Holiday we will have in the UK until August. Throughout March and April there was a spate of days off, not least because of the Royal Wedding, so I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the key trends that we’ve seen in the retail industry over the last few weeks, and how that will affect retail this Bank Holiday Monday.

For those of you who are regular readers of the blog, you may recognise a chart very similar to the one below which we produce each year in the run-up to Christmas. The chart shows the difference between online and offline retail traffic using Hitwise data (in red) for the daily online visits and Experian Footfall data (in blue) for the offline visits to the high street.

The first interesting trend to note is that the highest spike in online traffic this spring was on Sunday 27 March. This wasn’t actually a Bank Holiday but was the Sunday before Mother’s Day (3 April 2011). Just like at Christmas, there was an online spike before the big event, with UK Internet users buying cards, flowers and gifts for their mothers, followed by an offline spike a week later as last minute shoppers scrabbled around the high street to buy something the day before Mother’s Day.
During the Easter Bank Holiday online traffic fared much better than offline traffic. Easter Monday 25 April (ringed in green below) saw traffic peak for online retailers. Visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category were higher on Easter Monday than the traditional weekly peak on Sunday. On the other hand Easter Sunday (ringed in purple) was the single lowest day for Footfall in spring. People were happy to shop online over the Easter break, especially for BBQs, but weren’t necessarily eager to take the time to go shopping in town.

During the Royal Wedding (highlighted in yellow), traffic both online and offline decreased dramatically. Friday 29 April was the worst day in April for visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category. The Footfall Index score was 33% lower on the day of the Royal Wedding than on the same day in 2010.
So what can we expect from shopping this Bank Holiday weekend? Going by the previous trends this May Bank Holiday is set to be another big weekend for online retail and offline shopping may suffer if the weather stays fair. One trend that we always see around Bank Holidays is a huge increase in searches for opening times. During the Easter Bank Holiday searches for opening times tripled as people checked online when stores would be open both for personal and grocery shopping.

If nothing else, retailers would do well to ensure that their Bank Holiday opening times are posted on their homepages and are clearly visible for visitors to find.
Enjoy the long weekend and follow us on Twitter for more data updates on next Tuesday!