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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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High street retailers’ online demographics

December 11, 2008

High street retailers received 22% more UK Internet visits than online only retailers in November, and the gap is likely to widen during December. The chart below illustrates UK Internet visits to our two custom categories of high street and online only retailers over the last couple of years, and the trend is clear. In addition, the most recent IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops list featured 30 high street names in the top 50, including Argos (2), Tesco.com (5), Marks and Spencer (6), Next (7), and Tesco Direct (9) in the top 10.

To a certain extent this shift was inevitable; online only retailers such as Amazon were early adopters that enjoyed a significant market share in the early days, so it was to be expected that their relative share of the online retail market would decline over time. At the same time, it took a while for many high street retailers to ‘get’ the Internet and successfully move their offline proposition (and customers) to the web.

However, despite the gap having closed, there are still a number of high street retailers without transactional websites in the UK. Fashion retailers, for example, have made a huge amount of progress online this year, but the fact a number of big names are still not selling online implies that our Apparel and Accessories category will continue to outgrow the online retail market next year.

Bearing this in mind, we were curious to understand whether high street and online only retailers attract different types of visitors to their websites. Fortunately we have just updated our Lifestyle and Demographics tool within Hitwise, and one of the extremely valuable new features is the ability to produce demographics and lifestyle data for custom categories. Comparing the Experian Mosaic profiles of our two custom retail categories provided the results displayed in the graph below. The Mosaic types illustrated by the blue bars are better represented as visitors to online only retailers, while those illustrated by the orange bars prefer high street retailers’ websites.

The results show that early adopter Mosaic groups such as Urban Intelligence (defined as ‘Young, single and mostly well-educated, these people are cosmopolitan in tastes and liberal in attitudes’) and Symbols of Success (‘People with rewarding careers who live in sought after locations, affording luxuries and premium quality products’) are most over-represent with online only retailers. The other two groups in blue are Rural Isolation – to be expected, given that online retail is more popular in rural areas – and, perhaps more surprisingly, Grey Perspectives (‘Independent pensioners living in their own homes who are relatively active in their lifestyles’). However, looking at the demographics data 28.7% of visitors to online only retailers are aged 55+ compared with 25.0% for high street retailers, so maybe it’s not so surprising after all.

The websites of high street retailers are more popular with families. In particular, Happy Families (‘Families with focus on career and home, mostly younger age groups now raising children.’) and Blue Collar Enterprise (‘People who though not well-educated are practical and enterprising and may well have exercised their right to buy’), but also Suburban Comfort (‘Families who are successfully established in comfortable, mature homes. Children are growing up and finances are easier’). However, they are also more popular with less affluent groups such as Ties of Community and Welfare Borderline.

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In Categories Christmas | Demographics | Experian | Fashion | Mosaic lifestyle | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds

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