Boxing Day sales this year have been a bonanza for retailers, reinforcing a high-spending lead-up to Christmas.
Electronic card transaction company Paymark said people shopped in droves on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day.
Total sales recorded by Paymark amounted to a record-breaking $404.3 million.
The value of sales on Christmas Eve alone was up by 10.5 percent on the same day last year, while the Boxing Day increase was just under 5 percent.
Paymark head of customer relations, Mark Spicer, said the record for volume of transactions was also broken on Christmas Eve, with 4.8 million transactions during the day - 156 per second at the peak.
The company said some South Island regions led the spending spree on Christmas Eve with Otago, Canterbury and Nelson all recording double digit growth year on year.
Sales of clothing, apparel, jewellery were up, as was revenue from hospitality.
Boxing Day sales this year have been a bonanza for retailers. Photo: AAP
The country's largest mall, Westfield Sylvia Park in Auckland, was open from 7.30am yesterday with large queues forming outside stores.
Its manager, Jonathan Douglas, said the mall's 200 retailers reported it had been a particularly good Christmas season.
"We had between 80,000 and 90,000 people, we haven't got the exact numbers just yet, it has been a little bit busier than the same time last year - last year we had 82,000 people."
Mr Douglas said despite the rise in online shopping, many retailers were opening stores.
The online auction site TradeMe said unwanted Christmas gifts had led to a big surge in activity over the last two days.
TradeMe spokesperson, Jeff Hunkin, said more than 400,000 listings were made on the site between midday on Christmas Day and 3pm Boxing Day.
He said there were just over 1000 items under "unwanted Christmas presents", but he suspected other sellers were just being more subtle with their descriptions.
Some of the more bizarre listings included a greenhouse kitset with instructions written in Klingon, and a frozen three-legged chicken, being sold for charity.
