Today will be busiest ever for online shopping

(GETTY IMAGES)

British shoppers are expected to create the busiest ever online shopping day today as they flock to online stores to buy Christmas presents.

Known to retailers as "Cyber Monday", the first Monday after most shoppers' final monthly pay day has been the busiest day for e-retailers for the past three years.

Visa predict that £303 million will be spent online on their cards today, with five million transactions taking place. Despite the recession, this figure is 12 per cent higher than sales recorded on last year's Mega Monday, which they attribute to consumers taking advantage of online deals and increased online security.

Consumers are expected to spend £7.75 billion in the run-up to Christmas overall, says the online retail trade association IMRG. An estimated £13 billion will be spent across all sectors online, but figures on the high street are expected to fall by 2.1 per cent.

Richard Dodd, a spokesman for the British Retail Consortium, says most of our Christmas shopping could be later in December this year owing to deep discounting to draw in customers to make up for lost sales earlier in the year, and quicker delivery guarantees for e-shopping.

"The pattern for many years now has been for people to leave their Christmas shopping later and later.

"The biggest pre-Christmas spending will happen on that final weekend before Christmas and I would predict that the biggest time for online spending will be sometime within the week before that."

Both Amazon and John Lewis expect next Monday, December 5, to be their biggest shopping day.