Will Christmas presents of the future be delivered by drone?

According to Visa, the number of transactions could hit 7.7 million on “Cyber Monday”. And the world’s largest internet retailer Amazon said it has taken on 15,000 temporary employees to deal with the expected rush.

Now, there are suggestions the way those orders are delivered could change dramatically, after the company said it was testing an unmanned delivery drone. Amazon claimed a small helicopter would pick up products from its warehouse and could be flying them to directly customers’ homes within five years.

“I know this looks like science fiction, but it’s not,” said Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos.

“We can do half-hour delivery… and we can carry objects, we think, up to five pounds (2.3kg), which covers 86 per cent of the items that we deliver,” he told CBS television’s 60 Minutes programme.

Growing importance

The use of the Octocopter drones to run the service Amazon called “Prime Air” has not yet been given the go-ahead by authorities in Amazon’s native USA. But Mr Bezos’ plans, announced only days after reports from undercover journalists put the spotlight on working conditions in Amazon warehouses, could see an increase in the automation of its supply chain.

The company said it hoped to “get packages into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles”.

Rival retailer Waterstones released a spoof video on its own blog poking fun at Amazon’s claims. It said it was planning to adopt a system it called O.W.L.S. – the Ornithological Waterstones Landing Service. It joked that it would be employing owls to deliver products, saying that it would take “years” before the service was up and running because it “takes ages to train owls to do anything and we only just thought of it this morning”.

This year’s expected rush was due to peak at around 6pm on Monday as shoppers go online after work, Amazon said. In a statement, it added: “Last Cyber Monday, Amazon.co.uk saw more than 3.5 million items ordered on the site, at a rate of around 41 items per second.”

It has employed extra staff, but said it expected only around five per cent of them to be kept on after Christmas.

And credit card company Visa said that it expected £450m to be spent on Monday, with the number of individual online transactions increasing by 16 per cent on 2012’s “Cyber Monday”, the first Monday of December.

‘Big increase’

It highlights the growing importance to the UK economy of online retail. Visa reported that more than a quarter of the money spent using its services was now spent online.

And IMRG, the UK’s industry association for online retail, said that mobile purchases account for 27 per cent of the total spent online, which it said was a rise of 2,000 per cent since the start of 2010.

But John Lewis said it was not expecting Monday to be its biggest day. Mark Lewis, its director, said: “Our customers’ shopping habits have changed over the past few years, and our peak time for browsing and shopping on johnlewis.com is now Sunday evening.”

Andrew McClelland, chief operations & policy officer at IMRG said: “A big increase in sales through mobile devices has been a major factor in driving our Index to a stronger-than-expected performance in 2013; earlier this year we revised our forecast for 2013 up from 12 per cent to 15 per cent.

“The percentage of online sales completed through mobile devices has risen from 0.4 per cent at the start of 2010 to 27 per cent in the third quarter of 2013, and we anticipate that this growth will continue if the new range of budget tablets sell well this Christmas.”