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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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House & Garden Highest Growth in Retail Sector

January 22, 2007

Last week I had the opportunity to update some findings from our Hitwise Australia Holiday Shopping Report published in December 2006. I was interested to identify which verticals within the retail sector had experienced the most growth comparing December 2005 and December 2006 and came up with the following table:

Or view table here

You'll see that House and Garden at the top of the list grew its share of Shopping & Classifieds visits by 45.6%, and secondly Computers online retail, which already accounted for a substantial share of 6.95%, grew by another 18.11% in the December 2005 to December 2006 period. Note that Hitwise Australia tracks 21 shopping verticals.

I'll focus on the drivers of growth in the House and Garden retail sector. Investigating our demographics data, I noticed an increasing trend of male users, who currently still tip the gender swing in overall Internet usage, visiting the Shopping & Classifieds - House & Garden category. To illustrate, male visits comprised 39.34% of visits in House & Garden for the 12 weeks ending 5 March 2005 and 45.84% for 12 weeks ending 30 December 2006. Cricket Websites, which are dominated by male Internet users by 2 to 1, referred an increased traffic volume of 130.8% to the House & Garden category comparing December 2006 and December 2005 - helping to explain the demographic shift. Ashes sponsor and house and garden website Bunnings received a surge in upstream traffic from CricInfo.com for example in December 2006.

Another driver could be that consumer needs in the House & Garden retail sector are being better-met by local vendor services. For example local homewares store, Home Couture, that offers purchasing functionality online where other brands have stuck to a catalogue model, increased its market share by 66.8% comparing December 2006 to December 2005. This could be indicating they are meeting local demand for online shopping for homewares.

Family Websites - Essential Baby and Minti

The connection between House & Garden and Family websites to me makes intuitive sense. Yet in Hitwise Clickstream data the relationship does not appear to be as strong as it could be, with Shopping & Classifieds - House & Garden appearing as the 6th most visited retail category out of 21 after Lifestyle - Family for the week ending 13 January 2007. Here are 2 examples of family websites that have interesting features relevant to the House & Garden sector.

Essential Baby, recently acquired by Fairfax, was the leading website in the Hitwise Lifestyle - Family category, with 7.13% share week ending 13 January 2007. The nearest Australian competitor was The Bub Hub ranked #4 with 3.53% share.

The Hitwise Lifestyle profile of Essential Baby indicates the website is reaching a core family audience. Essential Baby attracted a representation index of 171.6 for users in the Mosaic Group, "Family Room" compared to the online population. Users in "Family Room" are characterised as young families, new home-buyers, relatively affluent, and wide users of lay-by and interest-free terms. The fact alone that they are new home-buyers should make them attractive to House & Garden marketers.

My second example is Minti, a social networking website for parents. Minti incorporates a number of web 2.0 properties designed to attract and engage users such as shared user parenting advice. If managed correctly, seeding content topics such as products around the home designed for children could establish web 2.0 retailing on Minti.

Dubbed as the "Myspace-for-parents", Minti has had steady growth since its launch in March 2006 and in December more than doubled its market share from 2.2% to 4.5% between weeks ending 2 December 2006 and 16 December 2006. Minti ranked at #14 amongst local websites in Lifestyle - Family for the week ending 13 January 2007.

I think we're yet to see more growth in the House & Garden online sector in 2007, as we see more mature user groups adopt online retail with better local services provided. Stay tuned!

Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 02:51 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories House and Garden