As expected, Monday 3 December 2012 dubbed “Cyber Monday” set new online shopping records this year in the UK. British Internet users made a massive 112 million visits to retail websites on Monday, the most visits the retail industry has ever seen in a single day. This represents a 32% increase compared to last year’s Cyber Monday.

Brits also set new records for the most time spent shopping online in a single day, with 15 million hours spent on retail sites. On average consumers spent 8 minutes and 12 seconds per visit to a retail website on Monday.

The biggest recipients of traffic on Monday were eBay, Amazon and Argos. These three destinations accounted for 30% of all visits to the retail category on the day and 62% of all retail visits went to the top 100 websites in the industry, showing the strength of the biggest online shopping brands.

Looking at the fast moving websites that saw the biggest increases in market share of visits this year compared  to Cyber Monday 2011, Amazon’s combined properties (.com and .co.uk) have seen the biggest increase overall, accounting for 12.18% of all retail visits on Cyber Monday 2012, up from 10.85% last year.

Two mobile websites were also among the fastest movers. eBay UK Mobile (ranked 16^th most popular retailer overall) and Argos Mobile (ranked 40^th) were the third and sixth fastest moving websites respectively on Cyber Monday, showing the UK’s increased appetite to shop on mobile devices. NotOnTheHighStreet.com managed to double its market share of visits from last year, indicating a desire for more unusual gifts this Christmas beyond the standard socks and cufflinks.

All of this points to a very successful Christmas online in 2012. We predicted a couple of weeks ago that there would be 115 million visits to retailers on Cyber Monday and so to fall just 3 million short of our prediction is pretty encouraging. By anyone’s measure, a 2.5% margin of error is not bad. With this in mind we know that the next couple of Monday’s (10 and 17 December) are also going to be big shopping days although not as big as Cyber Monday. We’re also expecting a bumper Christmas Eve for last minute click-and-collect shopping this year – before a monumental Boxing Day which should break records all over again.

Our pre-Christmas whitepaper is now available to download if you want to look at our predictions in more depth and we’ll also be running a free webinar on 12 December which you can sign up for on our festive insights page. Stay tuned to the blog and Twitter for our Christmas updates.