Manic Monday comes and goes as Brits splurge online

Wednesday, December 1, 2010 - 12:20 by Simon Crisp

This week saw the arrival of Manic Monday, or Mega Monday as some lucky e-commerce retailers are dubbing it, during which thousands of UK consumers made millions of purchases, generating huge amounts of sales revenue.

Various estimates have been raining in with many attempting to predict just how much cash was spent on safe shopping online, with some predicting that the total will be around £537 million. This would indicate an increase of almost a third compared to the same period in 2009.

Meanwhile, payment card firm Visa said that its customers would be accounting for almost half of that total, spending roughly £184,000 every single minute throughout the day.

There had been fears that the government cuts, lingering ripples of the recession and job losses would dampen spending amongst UK consumers, but these are set to be baseless, as the hunger for online shopping shows signs of growing yet again.

The reason that Manic Monday is so popular can be attributed to one key factor: many people have just received their final paycheque before Christmas and so they are trying to buy all of their presents while they still have the funds available.

The predictions from Visa are being seen as the most accurate, since a quarter of all transactions taking place around the UK are carried out using one of its payment cards, for both high street retail and safe shopping online.

Interestingly, a trend which seems to be taking off this year is buying in bulk as part of a group in order to save money. This can bag consumers big discounts on the price tag of many items and organised amongst friends is a good way to save this Christmas.

Voucher codes are another popular choice for bargains in the 2010 holiday season which shows that consumers are savvy about bagging discounts online at every opportunity.