(14 January 2010) The 2010 Christmas season was the best ever for the South African online marketplace bobshop.co.za in its eleven years of existence, says Bob Shop CEO Jaco Jonker. During the thirty days leading to Christmas, almost 100,000 products were sold on the site, about 40 percent more than in the same period in 2009.

During the 2010 festive shopping spree, the title of the fastest growing segment on bobshop.co.za went to - the baby.

That is because Bob Shopers - parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles et al. - spent exactly 133.9 percent more on baby related items during the 2010 Christmas shopping season than they did in the same period the previous year.

Another big winner on Bob Shop was the computer hardware section, with the value of sales doubling in comparison with 2009.  The best sellers in this category were laptops, netbooks and tablets.

Traditional Christmas gifting categories like toys and gaming fared well as usual, but so did some lines of products that are not traditionally associated with Christmas stockings. Whether because they decided to go for a different type of present or because they were gearing up for summer, shoppers went on a shopping spree over the festive season, purchasing products in Sports, Car Parts, Home, Photography and Clothing categories – all of which recorded impressive over 40 percent increases during this period.

However, the best sellers this Christmas season were hi-tech devices and gadgets. Apple iPad captured the imagination of South Africans, who went on to buy this “mini laptop” at the rate of over twenty a week. Among Smartphones, the most shopping votes went to BlackBerry, with about 150 units sold per week.

In gaming, the latest arrivals in motion-controlled gaming, Playstation Move console and X box Kinect console stirred lots of interest, but the best selling title went to (the more affordable) Nintendo Wii.

Among toys, the most popular were radio controlled helicopters and cars. Books were also a big hit this Christmas; both fiction and non-fiction titles sold well.

At the height of the Christmas rush, it was normal to see some 4000 transactions completed on the site daily. The Bob Shop CEO says that while the trading did slow down after the Christmas frenzy, it did not go into hibernation. “Even during the quietest days, we had over one thousand deals concluded on the site”, he says.

After the slightly slower Christmas to New Year period, Jonker says that traffic and sales have started to pick up in the second week of January. “This is also the time when we start noticing an increase in people making use of Bob Shop to offload their unwanted gifts in exchange for cash,” he concludes.

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