Boxing Day Retail Sales 2015: Shopping Malls Capitalize On Post-Christmas Customers In Stores And Online

Shoppers across the United Kingdom took to stores and shopping centers in droves to take advantage of Boxing Day sales throughout the weekend, the Financial Times reported Sunday. Retailers throughout the country saw a boost in revenues during the weekend after Christmas both in stores and online.

“In some places we have had very good figures. In Stoke-on-Trent we were 65 per cent up in footfall,” Gordon McKinnon, operations director of Intu Properties, a company that manages 18 shopping centers, told the Financial Times. “The Trafford Centre in Manchester saw a 6 percent rise,” he said, adding, “We have seen fantastic numbers and a shopping frenzy.”

Boxing Day is Dec. 26, the day after Christmas. Sales probably were boosted by the fact that the day, which is not an official holiday, fell on a Saturday this year.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, retailers predicted that sales from the day after Christmas would outpace those from such popular shopping days as Christmas Eve or Black Friday, according to an American Express poll cited by Forbes. Consumers were increasingly looking for sale-priced items and were willing to wait until the last minute —or later — to get them, according to the study.

Revenue from returned merchandise is also becoming an increasingly lucrative source of income for retailers and third-party consultants, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times. Around $284 billion of merchandise was returned in 2014, up 6.2 percent from 2013. Companies that serve as middlemen reselling returned items have seen a boom in business as a result, while retailers have taken advantage of online resale to recoup lost profits.

The Lanham, a company that works reselling returned or slightly damaged retail products online, told the LA Times it has seen a major increase in the profit retailers make off returned items. Where retailers were only seeing 10 to 30 percent recovery on the original price of the product several years ago, they are now seeing around 70 percent, according to Lanham.