Royal Mail has reported the top ten areas where people made the most purchases during Cyber Week 2018.

East London was where the most online shoppers made purchases, followed by Kirkwall, Llandrindod Wells and North West London. East London tops the London list, Kirkwall the Scotland list and Llandrindod Wells the Wales list. This was based on goods entering the Royal Mail system between 19th November and 27th November from online retailers and e-commerce businesses for delivery via the Royal Mail Tracked 24 and Royal Mail Tracked 48 services.

Cyber Week is now regarded as the start of the peak shopping season over the Christmas period. Recent Royal Mail research suggests that UK online shoppers spend on average £300 on goods over the Christmas period. The main reasons people choose to shop online at Christmas are convenience-related: being able to shop from the comfort of their home (68 per cent), the ability to shop any time of the day (63 per cent) and the ease of comparing prices (48 per cent).

A spokesperson for Royal Mail said “We have looked at parcel delivery data across our huge network of delivery offices and it has revealed East London is the UK’s Cyber Week online shopping hotspot for 2018. We take the planning for the period between Black Friday and New Year’s Day incredibly seriously and start planning for the next year the moment the current period is over. This year, on top of the huge number of processing and delivery sites we already operate, we have opened an extra six dedicated parcel sort centres to handle the additional volume we expect to be carrying.”

In December 2017, Royal Mail handled 149 million packages and the firm believes this is set to grow significantly this year.