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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

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Wal-Mart and Downstream Shipping

December 20, 2005

Eric Auchard from Reuters wrote a great article on using Hitwise data regarding downstream visits to shipping providers as a way to gauge online holiday sales. If a site sends shipment tracking request outside of its domain, we should see increases in downstream shipping that correlate to online sales. Here's a chart that I just created that shows a time-series for market share of visits to walmart.com in blue(based on all Internet visits) and downstream percentage of visits to UPS from walmart.com (red).

walmart shipping.png

Its interesting to see that last years spike occurs right before Christmas, presumably as consumers go online to check the status of their holiday present delivery. Also Interesting to see the lag between site visit spikes and UPS downstream spikes. Last year there is a one week lag, while this year the lag spends several weeks, possibly indicating users purchasing their gifits in advance of the holidays.

Posted by Bill Tancer at 06:23 PM | (0) | (0)