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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Silver surfers become silver shoppers
November 12, 2007
Everyone knows about the growth of silver surfers, so in the run up to Christmas we decided to see what impact they were having on online retail. The chart below illustrates the segmentation of visitors to our Shopping and Classifieds category by age group for the 4 weeks ending November 3rd this year and the same period last year. As you can see, there has been a significant increase in the proportion of visitors aged 55+ to the category. They are now the second largest group of visitors, accounting for 22.4% of all visits to online retail sites.
When comparing the Shopping and Classifieds category to the online population as a whole, no individual age group was strongly under- or over indexed compared to the online population. In other words, people of all age groups are now pretty much equally likely to visit a retail website. Interestingly, there also isn’t a huge difference when comparing the top 20 most visited retail sites for the oldest and youngest UK Internet users. As the table below illustrates, 13 of the top 20 websites are common to both 18-24 and 55+ age brackets
The sites highlighted in green have a higher ranking for the respective age-group – e.g. Dell EMEA has a higher ranking for people over the age of 55, while Play.com has a higher ranking in the 18-24 age group. Generally, the more established brands, department stores and directories / comparison sites are more popular with older shoppers, while younger shoppers prefer entertainment and apparel retailers. Marks & Spencer and John Lewis are both ranked highly with over-55s, but don’t appear in the younger top 20.
The table above is based on the total number visits for each age group, so it is perhaps unsurprising that it contains so many large brands. However, table below lists the 10 retail websites that currently receive the highest proportion of traffic from people aged over 55. So, Damart Online receives 73.5% of visits from this age group, but only 4.8% from people aged between 18 and 24. And what does Damart sell? Various items of clothing, but it specializes in thermal underwear.
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:00 PM
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In Categories Retail | Shopping and Classifieds
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Should the fast growing numbers of folks over 50 hitting the net come as a surprise? Not really if you bear in mind that the Baby Boomer generation helped sculpt the world as we know it today, from the 'love generation' over 40 years ago to falling in love with technology and gadgetry building upon the moon walks of the 1960s.
Posted by Dave NOBLE | December 11, 2007 12:43 PM