Live on BBC Radio Manchester

Shopsafe's Simon Crisp was talking live about online shopping on BBC Radio Manchester this afternoon, on the Heather Stott show. If you heard him email simon@shopsafe.co.uk and tell him how good he was!

Are You a Typical Online Christmas Shopper?

Last Christmas was a big one for online shopping, Amazon despatched over 250 tons of goods from its depot on one single day (the 12th of December), and this year is predicted to be even bigger.

This Christmas one pound in ten will be spent on the internet. To give you an idea what this means, John Lewis expects its online sales to overtake that of the Oxford Street store in London for the first time.

Research has shown that this Christmas the average online spend among UK internet users will be £237. Apparently 70% of internet users will buy online this Christmas, and that women are three times more likely to buy a gift over the internet than men.

So what will you be buying? The most common gifts we're seeing people buy are electrical items like cameras and ipods, gift experiences, clothes and food, as well as stocking fillers.

That Friday Feeling

Royal mail research has shown that Friday lunchtime is the most popular time of the week for shopping online, as people take advantage of internet connections at work to start the weekend shopping early.

Our own statistics from Shopsafe show that alongside online shopping peaks during weekday lunchtimes, shoppers are also likely to go online between 6pm and 8pm, once they're at home and the shops are shut.

Two Point Zero

We've taken our first steps into the supposed "web 2.0" era of social networking by establishing a Squidoo page at http://www.squidoo.com/shopsafe.

Watch it grow over the next few weeks...