We are now well into the Christmas shopping season and with less than a week to go till Christmas Day it’s time to make our predictions for Boxing Day and the post-Christmas shopping season.

For the last three years 26 December has been the single biggest online shopping day of the year and 2012 will be no exception. We’re predicting Brits will spend 17 million hours shopping on Boxing Day making a massive 126 million visits to retail websites.

For the first time ever we are also able to put together some predictions for the online spend on Boxing Day thanks to some data generously provided by IMRG. On Boxing Day 2012 the UK will spend £472.5 million making it the biggest online retail day ever witnessed in Britain.

We’ve already seen online records smashed this year with Cyber Monday hitting 112 million UK Internet visits to the retail industry and as expected, the second and third Mondays of December have performed significantly ahead of last year’s figures, up by 30% year-on-year.

These trends all point to a gargantuan Boxing Day which should be 31% ahead of last year’s 96 million Internet visits. One thing we’ve seen in the last three years is that it’s the multi-channel retailers (i.e. those retailers with both an online and high street presence) that benefit the most from Boxing Day traffic. The online-only retailers like eBay and Amazon are still going to get a lot of visits on Boxing Day, but with the post-Christmas sales there is always more of an emphasis on the multi-channel brands.

Our post-Christmas whitepaper will be coming out in January with all of the top trends over this Christmas retail period and we will also be running a free webinar on 16 January as well as our daily festive insights. We’ll also be blogging over Christmas with the top days say stay tuned for the latest online data.