Boxing Day sales: the best deals in 2014

The Boxing Day sales last year hit historic highs. Shoppers queued in the dark and spent an incredible £2.7 billion online and in stores on 26 December - the highest ever figure for Boxing Day. This year, millions of people will be poised to bag a bargain on Boxing Day, but what do we know about the Boxing Day sales so far?

The end of the Boxing Day sale phenomenon has been predicted for the past few years, as retailers issued pre-Christmas sales in higher numbers than ever before. Some commentators were predicting back in 2012 that we could see the death of the traditional sale as a result - as retailers couldn't afford to keep cutting their margins, and effective sales techniques meant there were fewer leftovers to shift. This proved erroneous - and for the past six years Boxing Day has been the biggest online shopping day of the year.
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All change

This year the fierce Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Mega Monday competition will lead to more speculation about the demise of Boxing Day shopping as a tradition. Bryan Roberts, an analyst at Kantar Retail, is on record for saying that the early sales mean that Boxing Day is "pretty much dead." While he's not saying the stores will cancel events, the effect of all the sales running over a period of weeks will dampen enthusiasm for a sale after Christmas.

However, Experian has predicted that Boxing Day will remain the most powerful day for sales in the retail calendar. It points to 2013 where there were massive peaks in online shopping during all of the big pre-Christmas events, but none of them could match the peak on Boxing Day. It highlights that a 15% growth between Boxing Day 2012 and 2013 shows that our appetite for spending in the sales is growing rather than diminishing - and even after all the sales we have seen so far, there will still be some things we don't yet own.

To date, Boxing Day has been dominated by high street sales - with around a fifth of shopping done online. Experian expects this trend to switch over the coming years, so we can expect a larger and larger proportion of Boxing Day sales to be enjoyed from the comfort of people's sofas.

With that in mind, keep your eyes peeled for the time that your favourite retailer is launching their Boxing Day sale: this year an increasing number are expected to start the ball rolling online on Christmas Day itself.

Following tradition

However, we can expect some Boxing Day sales to continue as they always have, particularly at the department stores, which love this tradition. Selfridges and Harrods are famed for their Boxing Day sales, and the experts are still predicting major bargains on offer there. Department store chains like John Lewis and House of Fraser have held a number of pre-Christmas sales already, but are expected to uphold the Boxing Day tradition too.

Clothing stores are also unlikely to move away from the tradition. In an industry dictated by trends, the Boxing Day sales have always proved a useful way of shifting unwanted winter stock, and this isn't going to change any time soon.

The supermarkets, by contrast, are seeing Boxing Day lose ground to Black Friday: when Tesco announced its Black Friday deals it clearly spelled out that it would be bigger than Boxing Day. It said at the time that it would still be offering Boxing Day discounts - but not as many as it did on Black Friday.

So it may be worth hitting the high street if you plan to queue round the block for a bargain, and give the supermarkets a miss this year.

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