It’s Man Dash day!

Today is ‘Man Dash‘ day in the Christmas shopping calendar, with menfolk rushing to the stores to buy last minute lingerie, fragrances and speciality chocolates for the ladies in their lives.

Selfridges suggest that 80 percent of men leave their Christmas shopping to the 11th hour and as a result, many retailers are rearranging their store layout to ensure that the products for women are placed prominently. Others have begun their January sales already to maximise revenues and to avoid the loss of sales that the Boxing Day tube strike in London will cause. French Connection, (which issued a profit warning earlier this month for example, brought forward its sale by a week.

Visa is expecting to process more than 33 million transactions, worth more than £1.5 bn today, an increase of around 8 percent, compared with the same period last year, but actually expects the biggest shopping flurry to be tomorrow, Christmas Eve, between noon and 1pm.

However a report by accountant RSM Tenon released yesterday paints a very bleak picture of the British high street, claiming that 13 percent of retailers (around 8,990) are at risk of collapsing into insolvency. And more data released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics, showed that UK shopper numbers for this week are lower than the bad snow pre-Christmas week of 2010.

So the word for 2012 has to be ‘multichannel.’ But there is help out there for retailers who need ecommerce support. We’re here to help and we’ve got some exciting developments coming out the gate in the New Year too. Watch this space for announcements soon!

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