Good Year for Online Shopping Sites

More pre-Christmas retail cheer - this time for shopping Web sites, which have increased their share of all UK Internet user visits from 5.85% in October 2002 to 8.66% a year later, according to the Hitwise Online Retail Report 2003. The figure should rise to more than 10% in December.

Looking at the breakdown of visits within retail, the top 5 sectors in October 2003 were Auctions (29.68% of retail visits), Rewards & Directories (16.7%), Department Stores (13.97%), Books (9.62%) and Appliances & Electronics (7.18%). In the last 12 months the two fastest growing categories have been Auctions and Rewards & Directories.

Retail site visitors generally view a large number of pages per visit - close to twice as many per site as the average on the 'Net. Sessions are long - Tesco ( www.tesco.com/superstore ) is in first place with an average session duration of 21 minutes and 50 seconds, followed by B&Q ( www.diy.com ) with 10 minutes and 1 second and Play ( www.play.com ), with 9 minutes and 3 seconds.

eBay has seen the biggest rise up the rankings with a jump of 184 places since October 2002, and is the most popular shopping keyword searched by UK Internet users (8 different variations of the eBay brand appear within the top 100 shopping keywords), followed by 'argos' and 'amazon'. Other big rises were recorded by DealTime (up 23 places) and O2 Shop (up 19 places).

Maplin Electronics is the most bookmarked shopping site - by 4.05% of visitors. The most popular products consumers are searching for and then clicking through on are 'mobile phones', 'digital cameras' and 'lingerie'. 57.3% of visitors to shopping sites are male, with 28.64% of all visitors belonging to the 35 to 44 age group.

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

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