GUEST COMMENT Boxing Day boxes clever: are retailers missing the bigger Q4 sales opportunity?

Andy Squire, regional lead at Brave Ads, looks at why retailers concentrating their firepower on Black Friday could be overlooking some of the most valuable sales opportunities of the Christmas period.

It wasn’t so long ago that Boxing Day was the undisputed king of the British sales calendar. Shoppers queued outside department stores in the early hours, scrapped over discounted white goods, and descended on the high street to panic buy piles of cut-price clothes and Christmas stock. Next thing you know, Black Friday arrives from America and the party is over.

These days, Black Friday is an obsession for retail marketers, with huge budgets, months of planning and increasingly elaborate campaigns geared towards getting customers to part with their cash. And while there’s no questioning its importance, it’s worth considering whether all this attention is coming at the expense of other opportunities throughout the Christmas and holiday sales season. After all, there’s little point fighting tooth and nail for Black Friday customers if good sales opportunities are being missed later in the quarter. Because Boxing Day, despite playing second fiddle in the public’s cultural consciousness, still has plenty to offer.

The trouble with Black Friday

Adobe reports that UK consumers spent £1.16 billion online during Black Friday 2025, making it the biggest online shopping day of the year. It’s an enormous opportunity, and understandably one that retailers are keen to capitalise on.

The danger comes when brands put too much faith in a single event. Consumer confidence remains fragile, spending is more considered and competition for shoppers’ attention is fierce, frantic and furious. Even the best-laid Black Friday plans can fall short, leaving retailers with exhausted budgets with huge Q4 opportunities yet to come.

And people don’t necessarily buy according to a retailer’s promotional calendar. Some deliberately hold out for better deals, others wait for Christmas money to arrive, while plenty simply aren’t in the market for a particular product until later in the season.

It seems strange, then, that so much attention is lavished on November when there’s still considerable business to be done in December.

The sales opportunities going begging

There’s also evidence that retailers are failing to capture demand that already exists. In some cases, campaigns are launched too late, while in others brands are simply not doing enough to reach people actively searching for their products.

Our analysis suggests that even some of the UK’s biggest retailers could be missing out on valuable opportunities by overlooking alternative search platforms. In an average week, a leading grocery retailer could be missing out on more than 700 clicks a day, while the likes of Argos, Currys, and Debenhams could also be missing out on more than 127,000 search queries combined.

For major retailers, missed opportunities at scale can significantly impact incremental revenue, particularly during the busy Christmas shopping period. And with the sales season stretching well beyond Black Friday, there’s a strong argument for making sure campaigns are reaching shoppers wherever they’re searching.

Boxing Day is a good example. While the traditional high-street scrum isn’t quite what it was, Adobe reports that UK consumers spent more than £500 million online on 26 December 2025.

There’s also evidence that the sales rush is spreading beyond the day itself. According to MRI Software, retail footfall on 27 December 2024 was up 14.2% on the previous year. Barclays, meanwhile, found that although fewer consumers intended to shop the Boxing Day sales in 2025, those who did were planning to spend more.

So while Boxing Day might not enjoy the status it once did, it’s hardly an irrelevance. Indeed, for retailers whose Black Friday campaigns failed to live up to expectations, the days after offer another chance to get things moving.

There’s more search demand out there, too

The other consideration is where brands choose to advertise. Retailers can spend months refining their Christmas campaigns and still leave potential customers untouched because they’re concentrating almost exclusively on the dominant advertising platforms.

Google and Microsoft are enormously important to PPC, but consumers don’t all use the same search engines. Independent alternatives attract audiences for various reasons, from privacy and speed to a preference for using something outside the established platforms.

For brands, that’s incremental demand worth investigating. It doesn’t require abandoning successful campaigns or diverting large budgets away from channels that work. Rather, it’s a question of capturing incremental clicks and revenue elsewhere, particularly during a period when consumers are actively searching for deals.

Retailers should be equally curious about the opportunities they’re missing as the ones they’re already capturing.

Black Friday is dead. Long live Boxing Day

Nobody seriously expects Black Friday to disappear, and nor should retailers and brands want it to. But its dominance of the Q4 marketing calendar shouldn’t distract from the money still changing hands after the November rush.

A little more flexibility in budgets, earlier preparation and greater attention to where shoppers are searching could make a considerable difference. Particularly for brands that have already missed out on opportunities elsewhere in the season. Boxing Day might never reclaim its old crown, but retailers would be foolish to write it off.

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