Shoppers splurge on Christmas Eve

New Zealanders spent more electronically than ever before in a last-chance consumer dash on Christmas Eve, figures from Eftpos-provider Paymark show.

Yesterday, New Zealand shoppers spent $226 million in electronic transactions, $10m more than the $216m spent last year.

Shoppers and retailers carried out 4.2m transactions for the day, with a peak of 131 transactions per second between noon and 1pm - breaking all previous records, Paymark chief executive Simon Tong said.

The value for transactions for the month was up just a tick over 4 percent and the volume was up just over 6.5 percent. New Zealanders had so far spent over 3.5 billion for the month of December.

"From our point of view, value had either been down or flat all the way through the winter. October, November was up 1.2 percent, but it seems to have been influenced by fuel prices. But December seems to have been strong from the get-go, really."

However, he was wary of making any sweeping statements from the December data alone.

"I was asked the other day, 'Is this the end of the recession?' You can't really pick that out of one month.

"It might be that people have just had a gutsful of all the depressing talk over winter and decided the sun was out and it was time for Christmas. You just can't tell," he said.

"The only other thing I can put it down to is a further move away from cash and cheques, and more using the Eftpos system."

After the holidays, the company's analysts would look at the figures, to work out where in the country people had been spending, and which sectors fared best.

- NZPA