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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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Comparison shopping sites can help influence new shoppers

December 17, 2009

A few weeks ago I wrote about the opportunity for retailers to build brand credibility through strengthening online content around consumer product reviews. This is part of a wider theme of understanding both the short and long term influencing factors during the customer online buying cycle.

In this post, I want to take a step back and look at how we can help identify where the customer ‘starts’ their shopping research. To that end, I looked at the downstream clicks of the largest distributor of traffic to retail websites in Australia, i.e. Google Australia (more than 1 in 4 clicks during November 2009), and used our ‘new visitors’ filter to understand where new customers were going.

You can see that eBay Australia and Trading Post Online get the most ‘new’ traffic which is probably more a factor of their sheer online size. What’s notable is the prevalence of comparison shopping websites, namely Shopping.com AU, GetPrice, MyShopping.com.au, and Lasoo amongst the top 20 websites.

While having a strong online brand presence is important in attracting customers direct via search engines, strong partnerships with comparison shopping websites is also key in influencing customers during the early phase of the buying cycle.

Update: Note that the websites in the table are listed in order of 'new click volume'. The horizontal bars in the far right column allude to the 'new' vs. 'returning' visitor rate per website.

Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 08:00 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Shopping and Classifieds