NEW YORK ? Online retailers must have been very good this past year, as Santa delivered them an enormous surge in shopping traffic this holiday season, with Shopping and Classifieds sites claiming more than 9 percent of the total U.S. Internet visits from in the last two months of 2004 ? a nearly 26 percent increase from a year ago.
The peak day to shopping and classifieds web sites was Nov. 25, Thanksgiving Day.
?While visits to Shopping and Classifieds sites reached new highs this year, it is interesting to note that 2004 holiday season daily traffic patterns achieved a near-perfect correlation with last year?s daily patterns,? said Bill Tancer, vice president of research, Hitwise. ?In looking forward to the next holiday season, this repeating pattern provides invaluable insight to marketers in order to maximize their online marketing spend.?
According to Hitwise 2003 and 2004 holiday-season daily data, peaks in traffic occur on weekends with Sundays typically stronger than Saturdays. The two exceptions are Thanksgiving Day, which is the most intensive shopping day, and Christmas Day.
?Where 2004 differed from 2003 was in the delayed yet rapid growth curve leading into Thanksgiving,? said Tancer. ?Shopping sites increased 26.0 percent from Nov. 1 to Nov. 24, 2004 versus a 6.8 percent increase over the same period in 2003. With the elections, the war in Iraq and mixed economic signals, it appears that consumer uncertainty played some role in that shift.?
Another trend this year is that the market share of visits to large pure-play retailers peaked over a range of days, specifically, visits to Dell, eBay and Amazon peaked on Dec. 9, Nov. 10 and Dec. 11 respectively. Conversely, visits to the largest brick-and-mortar sites tended to peak on Nov. 25 (Thanksgiving Day) ? including Walmart, Best Buy and Target ? as consumers researched online before heading to stores on Black Friday.
An analysis of the fastest moving sites on Christmas Day 2004 (versus the prior day, Dec. 24, 2004) reveals three important trends:
Visits to music sites skyrocketed, most likely caused by music downloading among recipients of iPods, mp3 players and online gift certificates. Specifically, iTunes jumped from 85th place in the Shopping & Classifieds category on Dec. 24 to 37th place on Dec. 25th, and MusicMatch jumped from 79th place to 46th.
Visits to movie tickets sites peaked on Christmas Day, confirming the popularity of films during the holiday season, as well as the practicality of online gift certificates as a last-minute holiday gift. Fandango jumped from 33rd place on Dec. 24, 2004 in the Shopping & Classifieds category to 18th place on Dec. 25th, and MovieTickets.com jumped from 59th place to 28th.
Visits to traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers also skyrocketed on Christmas Day as visitors contemplated returns and researched post-Christmas sales.
Key Christmas Day ranking shifts in the Shopping category include:
Kohls (www.kohls.com): 72nd place to 24th place
Macys (www.macys.com): 62nd place to 48th
American Eagle Outfitters (www.ae.com): 74th place to 50th
Best Buy Weekly Specials (bestbuy.dailyshopper.com): 148th place to 70th
Borders (www.bordersstores.com): 214th place to 72nd
Abercrombie and Fitch (www.abercrombieandfitch.com): 110th place to 75th
Top growing shopping categories last week were: Flowers & Gifts; Computers ; Music; Appliances & Electronics; and Video & Games.
The fastest growing shopping categories versus last year (week ending Dec. 27, 2003) were: Classifieds; Grocery & Alcohol; Automotive; Sport & Fitness and Auctions.
Shopping and Classifieds (8.72 percent) was the third most popular online category after Adult (17.44 percent) and Search Engines and Directories (14.25 percent).
Of the top 200 shopping and classifieds websites, the fastest moving sites last week were Day Spring Cards (up 170 percent), Virgin Mobile USA (up 127 percent), Teleflora (up 109 percent), FTD (up 108 percent) and Magazines.com (up 90 percent).
