December 12, 2006

Toys R Us Online Store Takes 22% Share of Category

Until July of this year, Toys R Us online retail was hosted at Amazon.com, leaving ToysRUs.com to serve as little more than a store locator and source for corporate information. Now that it's the peak season for online toy shopping, it's a good time take a look at the effects of the new ToyRUs.com retail site on online toy shopping this holiday season.

Using Hitwise Charting, it's easy to figure out how ToysRus.com is doing against its competitors by running a series of four charts.

1. Market Share
During the 2005 Holiday season, ToysRus.com was competing neck and neck with KBToys.com and eToys for market share, all with less than 4% category share. In July, when ToysRUs.com ecommerce functionality went live, its market share of visits skyrocketed, and last week (week ending 12/9/06), it was the #1 site in the Toys & Hobbies category with market share of a whopping 22%.

2. Clickstream
Since ToysRUs.com was partnered with Amazon.com for retail, it follows that most of the downstream traffic leaving ToysRus.com would go to Amazon.com. Running a chart of downstream to Amazon shows us that this was indeed true - over 50% of the traffic leaving ToysRus.com went to Amazon.com. When ToysRUs.com became a retail site, the downstream to Amazon.com dropped to around 3%, which is typical competitive traffic for an online retailer. What's interesting about this chart is that the downstream from eToys and KBToys.com to Amazon.com dropped as well - it seems that as soon as users figured out that ToysRus.com was now a retail site, they were less likely to go to Amazon.com to look for toys.

3. Session Time
Last week the average visit length to the Toys & Hobbies category was nearly 11 minutes. During the 2005 holiday season, the session time for ToysRUs.com hovered around 2-3 minutes, while visits to competitors' sites lasted upwards of 9 minutes. Apparently ToysRus.com has built a site that is much stickier than competitive sites, as last week's average visit was longer than 12 minutes, while KBToys.com and eToys.com average visits were under 9 minutes each.

4. Search
Charting share of searches can offer insights into brand popularity. In this case, I charted the top navigational search term sending traffic to each of the three toy sites. It turns out that searches for 'toys r us' have always far exceeded searches for 'kb toys' and 'etoys.' This demonstrates the strength of the Toy R Us brand, and offers clues as to why Toys R Us went through the effort of building its own online retail infrastructure. Clearly consumers expected to find a ToyRUS.com retail site, even though products had been sold through Amazon for years. Also notice the significant growth in searches during the the holiday season - Toys R US is definitely top of mind during the Christmas shopping rush.

Postscript: Google Checkout
Two weeks ago I reported that ToysRUs.com was the leading site sending traffic to Google Checkout, accounting for 24% of Google Checkout's upstream visits. For the week ending 12/9/06, it was virtually unchanged at 23% of upstream for Google Checkout. Looking at it another way, 3.5% of the traffic leaving ToysRUs.com went directly to Google Checkout, giving an indication of the conversion rate for ToysRus.com.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:08 PM
Posted to Shopping and Classifieds

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/400.

Comments

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)