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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Boxing Day the busiest day of the year for online retailers in 2010
December 27, 2010
Repeating the pattern that we have seen over the last few years, Boxing Day was again the busiest day of the year for online retailers during 2010. Yesterday (December 26th) UK Internet visits to online retail websites were 12% higher than on the pre-Christmas peak in traffic (December 5th) and 26% higher than on Christmas Day (December 25th), which itself experienced a record level of traffic this year.
The biggest beneficiaries of the surge in traffic were department stores and fashion retailers, which combined accounted for 13 of the top 20 most visited retail websites in the UK on Boxing Day 2010. Sites in these sectors that improved their ranking between Christmas Day and Boxing Day included: M&S, John Lewis, Tesco Direct, River Island, New Look and House of Fraser. The other industries that did well were consumer electronics and entertainment products: Currys, Comet, Play.com, PC World and Game all outperformed the market as consumers flocked online to pick up discounted high ticket items such as widescreen TVs, laptops and tablet computers (e.g. Apple’s iPad), as well as video games and accessories to play on their new consoles.
With the sales being the main driver of visits to retail websites over the last couple of days, the biggest beneficiaries online have been the multi-channel or high street retailers. As the chart below illustrates, on Christmas Day the websites of high street retailers received 103% more traffic than their online only counterparts; by Boxing Day that gap had increased to 123%.This points not only to the strong sale brands of the big high street names such as Next and Debenhams, but also to a lot browse-before-you-buy behaviour. The sales shopping experience is hard to replicate on online, and most bargain hunters would prefer to hit the high street or local mall on Boxing Day; what this data shows is that many of them carry out research online first.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 10:25 AM
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In Categories Christmas | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds
