"We've also seen quite a lot of early buying of gift products and so on," Pippa Wicks, executive director of John Lewis told reporters.

"My thinking is that actually people are bringing forward buying for Christmas because they want to make sure they can get it," she said.

She added that Christmas 2020 would be predominantly online for the department store chain.

"We're running at 60% online, I expect that to continue, it might even go up a bit."

(Reporting by James Davey; editing by Kate Holton)