Boxing Day sales boost predicted as shoppers hit high streets and online

Shoppers are expected to spend £3.8bn today, 2% more than last Boxing Day, with online sellers seeing most of that growth but high streets also benefiting from a renewed appetite for post-Christmas bargains.

- Sarah Butler

Boxing Day remains one of the busiest shopping days of the year, but in recent years the dash for the high street has eased as more people opt to search for bargains from the sofa.

With many discounts kicking off from midnight on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day is now worth more than £1bn in sales, with 23 million people in the UK expected to be buying online. That's half a million more than last year - according to analysts from the research firm GlobalData for VoucherCodes.co.uk.

Sales in high streets and other physical shopping centres today are expected to rise 1.5% compared with last year, a figure that is higher than the 0.6% rate of shop price inflation, according to the latest British Retail Consortium data. That is less than half the 3.4% growth expected in online sales, according to GlobalData.