Christmas Early for UK's Online Retailers?

September was the busiest month of 2003 so far for Internet shopping sites, according to online measurement company Hitwise. The retail sector accounted for 8.06% of all online traffic during September - a 44% increase in market share compared with the same period last year.

The last 12 months have been particularly good for Auction sites, Apparel & Accessories and Flowers & Gifts sites. The Rewards & Directories category has also seen a significant increase in market share, with traffic to sites such as Kelkoo and Pricerunner increasing by over 60% in the last 12 months.

eBay www.ebay.com is the runaway leader in the category, with its shopping site third. Grocery sites sees the longest visits with visitors to Tesco www.tesco.com/superstore remaining for an average of 21 minutes and 51 seconds, followed by Sainsbury's and Waitrose. Ocado is the most often bookmarked of the 5.

Shopping site URLs are often seen in advertising and it is perhaps not surprising that only 27.3% of their traffic originated from Search Engines. Looking at the reverse figure, 8% of all successful searches resulted in visits to retail sites. Among the products most searched-for are mobile phones and digital cameras, and among brands eBay, Argos and Amazon were the most common search terms.


Top 10 Shopping & Classifieds sites by visits, September 2003

Rank	Name	Domain	Market Share %	% Bookmarking
1	eBay UK	www.ebay.co.uk	24.90	0.59
2	Amazon UK	www.amazon.co.uk	5.68	0.10
3	eBay Shops UK	www.ebayshops.co.uk	3.03	0.32
4	MSN eShop	eshop.msn.com	2.91	0.00
5	eBay	www.ebay.com	2.90	0.63
6	Tesco.com	www.tesco.com	1.50	0.08
7	Kelkoo United Kingdom	uk.kelkoo.com	1.41	1.47
8	Amazon.com	www.amazon.com	1.22	0.12
9	Argos	www.argos.co.uk	0.92	2.05
10	Play.com	play.com	0.85	0.07

Top 5 Shopping & Classifieds - Grocery sites by average session time, September 2003

Rank	Name	Domain	Average session time mins:secs	% Bookmarking
1	Tesco Superstore	www.tesco.com/superstore	21:51	0.04
2	Sainsbury to You	www.sainsburystoyou.co.uk	21:13	0.25
3	WaitroseDeliver	www.waitrosedeliver.com	17:14	2.40
4	Iceland Online Store	www.icelandstore.co.uk	16:31	1.53
5	Ocado	www.ocado.com	14:36	3.51

Top 10 Shopping & Classifieds Brand Searches

The following lists the most popular brands typed into a search engine over the last 12 weeks which resulted in traffic to websites classified by Hitwise within the 'Shopping & Classifieds' category.

Rank	Brand
1	ebay
2	argos
3	amazon
4	tesco
5	comet
6	currys
7	b&q
8	ikea
9	pc world
10	homebase

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

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