January Sales Bring in UK Surfers

The UK's online retail sector performed very strongly during the January period, according to online competitive intelligence service Hitwise. Retail sites saw a 20% increase in traffic year-on-year from January 2004 to January 2005.

This follows a Christmas season during which problems on the traditional High Street contrasted with major growth in online gift-buying. Many online retailers ran their own January sales, and although traffic was down overall from December 2004 - the biggest month for online retail each year - traffic for January 2005 exceeded 10% market share (10.6%), compared with 8.8% reached in January 2004.

Fashion performed particularly well, with online celebrity fashion superstore ASOS (www.asos.com) getting 28% more traffic than in January 2004 and high street clothing chain Next (www.next.co.uk) also witnessing strong growth online. The phrase 'next sale' featured amongst the top 50 search terms used to find online shopping sites during January 2005.

Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 web sites across 160 industry categories each day. Its own home page is at www.hitwise.co.uk

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

• All news