Boxing Day ecommerce merchant returns by the numbers: Exclusive data from Loop

Boxing Day isn't a one-day event to react to, it's the leading edge of what's become known as "Q5," the returns peak that now runs from December 26 through late January. The brands that handle it well aren't scrambling on the 26th, they set their fraud thresholds, staffing, and exchange incentives back in October and November, before the wave even started building.

Recently, we showcased our proprietary data from over 5,000 Loop Shopify stores, focusing on their sales metrics and trends during BFCM. But as we all know, many of those sales aren't final, a higher than average number of holiday sales end up being processed as returns or exchanges. While we'll cover the entire post-holiday returns window in more detail elsewhere, today, let's focus on returns processed on the single most popular day for sending products back: Boxing Day.

What is Boxing Day, and why does it matter for returns?

Boxing Day is the historic name for the day after Christmas, December 26th. It gets its name from a British tradition of collecting alms boxes of donations for the poor and distributing them the day after Christmas. Now, most people associate it with "boxing up" unwanted gifts and sending them back for a refund or exchange instead.

For merchants, though, Boxing Day has become something like a second BFCM: many run steep discounts to capture shoppers spending fresh Christmas money and gift cards, driving a real spike in traffic and sales of its own. But that same order surge comes with a mirror-image surge in returns.

That returns association is shifting globally, and it's shifting toward exactly the kind of transaction Loop tracks. In the UK, in-person Boxing Day shopping has grown more slowly than online shopping in recent years, a trend Scott Parson, COO of Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, described directly to Economic Times: "this dwindling reliance on physical Boxing Day sales aligns with the burgeoning trend of online shopping."

That shift isn't uniform everywhere. In Canada, only 36% of holiday shoppers planned to shop Boxing Day sales in 2024, compared to 50% who shopped Black Friday, Boxing Day competes with other post-holiday moments there rather than dominating them. And globally, shoppers are simply spending more across the whole window: average planned holiday spend rose from $155 to $192 this year, per Shopify's 2025 Global Holiday Retail Report.

Every one of those purchases, wherever it happens and however it's spent, eventually runs through the same question: does it come back? That's where Loop's own data picks up.

Boxing Day 2025 returns, by the numbers

Boxing Day 2025 set a new bar. Loop handled 183,609 returns that day, our highest-volume day ever, up 15% year over year, averaging roughly 7,650 returns an hour, 2 to 3 a second, climbing to 4 to 5 a second at peak. Behind the scenes, that meant 19 million workflow evaluations and 120,960 shipping labels created in a single day. 2025 now holds 8 of the 10 highest-volume return days in Loop's history.

US: Steady growth, most of it retained through exchanges

The US retains roughly 38% of return value through exchanges and store credit rather than refunding it outright, with both return volume and return value up 13% year over year, and average return value essentially flat at $134.65.

UK: The fastest growth, and the lowest retention rate

UK return volume roughly tripled year over year, driven by a fast-growing merchant base and existing merchants processing more returns too. But it also retains the least of any region, just 14% of return value, average return value here runs a bit lower too, at $117.93.

AU/NZ: The best retention rate we track, and the latest to peak

AU/NZ retains just over half of all return value, 52%, by far the strongest of the three regions, even though Boxing Day itself isn't this region's actual peak day. That lands over a week later, January 6th.

Two patterns that held for a second year

Loop merchants made $308K in upsell on Boxing Day 2025, over $300K in upsell alone for a second year running. Noon EST held as the single busiest hour for US returns again, 15,881 returns that hour, narrowly ahead of 1pm (15,079) and 11am (14,988).

In both the UK and Australia/New Zealand, longer holiday breaks and travel push the actual peak later than Boxing Day itself. Boxing Day was the outright peak day for the US (then Dec 29 at 135.8K, Dec 30 at 118.7K). UK merchants peaked January 2nd (13,327), with Dec 29 close behind (12,855). AU/NZ peaked even later, January 6th (7,690), Boxing Day itself was only 5,691 returns there.

Turn Boxing Day returns into retained revenue

Boxing Day isn't slowing down, and neither are the six weeks that follow it. The brands still treating this day as the finish line are already behind the ones treating it as the middle of the season, not the end of it. Optimizing for exchanges and upsells instead of straight refunds keeps the revenue from the original sale in the business, and keeps a shopper who might otherwise be gone for good. Using Keep Item to credit customers for low-value returns eliminates reverse logistics costs entirely, and pairing it with donation or recycling options turns an unsellable return into a sustainability story instead of landfill.

Boxing Day is the loudest day of the returns wave, not the whole of it. For what happens across the rest of the post-holiday window, see our Post-Holiday Returns & Sales Trends breakdown.

Want to see how Loop turns Boxing Day's returns wave into retained revenue instead of lost customers? Book a demo.