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Christmas Shopping - On Track for a Great Season
November 01, 2005
With dire predictions in the media about the prospects for retailers at Christmas this year, I thought I'd look at Hitwise to see if our data reflects a slowdown. November 1 is a little early for most of us to be shopping so I looked for some leading indicators. So far, our data shows that online retailers are set to enjoy another prosperous Christmas.
UK visits to retail websites up 12% year on year
A few weeks ago, I predicted that visits to retail websites would grow by 12% year on year in December. So far so good - share of visits to retail websites were up 12% year on year last week. I also predicted that visits would grow by 25% from July to December. Comparing the last week of July with the last week of October, UK visits to Shopping & Classifieds websites have grown 9%.
Searches for "christmas presents" are even with this time last year
While scrolling through search terms for our upcoming UK Retail Insight Report, I noticed that the search term "christmas present" was showing up among the top 200 search terms sending visits to websites in the Hitwise Rewards and Directories category. We are all a little hooked on charting search terms at Hitwise and I couldn't resist. Low and behold, the chart revealed that the volume of searches for "christmas presents" was almost even last week compared with the week ending 30 October 2004. Also, as you can see from the chart below, searches for 'christmas present' are following a similar pattern as last year, indicating that we are on track for another healthy year for online retailing.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 09:14 AM
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Thanks for the data. Because the search patterns for any one keyword can be influenced by non-macroeconomic factors, I think it would be more insightful to show a graph for the top 100 keywords related to 'Christmas presents'.
Posted by Chris Zaharias | November 1, 2005 03:51 PM