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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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BT buys Dabs.com for Online Sales Growth

April 28, 2006

The announcement today that BT would buy the UK Electricals and Computer retailer Dabs.com surprised many. I took a look at Hitwise data on Dabs.com and BT to see what our data could reveal about the match. Reuters reported that BT bought Dabs.com to "buoy its retail sales by offering its full range of telecoms and IT products and support services on the site which sells items ranging from computer chips to light sabres."

Dabs.com received a four times larger share of visits compared with BT Shop last week, however BT.com received a 10 times larger share of visits than Dabs.com. Dabs ranked 8th among Shopping & Classifieds - Computers sites last week, down slightly from 7th one year ago. BT Shop and Dabs.com are both categorised in the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds - Appliances and Electronics category. Within that category, Dabs.com ranked 12th last week while BT Shop ranked 42nd.

According to Hitwise data there is very little overlap in the products that consumers visit the BT and BT Shop sites for and those that send them to Dabs.com. This indicates that the acquisition will open new opportunities for BT. Specifically, analysis of Hitwise search term data reveals that BT and BT Shop are best known for telephones (handsets and plans), answering machines, internet access, walkie talkies, baby monitors, and routers.

Dabs.com on the other hand is most often visited for printers, monitors, desktop computers, laptops, memory cards and MP3 players.

The following table lists the top 10 product search terms sending visits to BT Shop and Dabs.com in the past four weeks:

Dabs.com receives its visits from varied sources, with 30% of upstream visits to the site last week coming from Search Engines, 12% from price comparison sites (such as Kelkoo) and 5% coming from Email Services. Interestingly, BT and BT Shop both figured in Dabs.com's upstream and downstream sites last week. BT accounted for .15% of visits to Dabs.com last week while BT Shop accounted for .04% of the site's visits.

BT's stated rationale for the acquisition is certainly supported by Hitwise data. Whether the acquisition will have the intended effect and give BT the ability to build its position in computers retailing will only be known in time.

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