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January 04 2008
The sales are up on Christmas
Post-Christmas and even pre-Christmas sales are showing huge increases according to results from Hitwise and Play.com gets the lion’s share online
Hitwise revealed that the busiest day for online retailers during the Christmas shopping season, and therefore the whole of 2007, was Boxing Day (26th December). There were 7.1% more UK Internet visits to Shopping and Classifieds websites on Boxing Day this year than the second busiest day in December (2nd December), and 1.3% more than Boxing Day last year.
“Online Christmas shopping patterns have changed significantly over the last two years,” commented Robin Goad, Hitwise Director of Research. “Historically, online retailers have focused on the pre-Christmas shopping period and, in 2005, the peak shopping day online was 4th December. However, this year, bargain-hungry British shoppers have voted with their wallets, and more people than ever are shunning cold turkey on Boxing Day in favour of online sales shopping.”
The three busiest online shopping days in December, 2005-2007 (based on UK Internet traffic to Shopping and Classifieds websites)
Rank 2007 2006 2005
1 26-Dec 26-Dec 04-Dec
2 02-Dec 10-Dec 11-Dec
3 09-Dec 03-Dec 10-Dec
High street retailers received over twice as many UK Internet visits on Boxing Day as their pure-play online rivals. A Hitwise custom category of the top 50 high street retailers’ websites accounted for 5.39% of all UK Internet visits on Boxing day, compared to 2.37% for top 50 pure-play online retailers. The five high street retailers with the most visited websites were: Argos, Currys, Comet, Marks & Spencer and Next.
“The popularity of high street retailers during the sales season is due to a combination of strong brand presence and shoppers choosing to browse online before heading out to the high street or shopping centre,” commented Goad. “Looking at the top five list, it is clear that the most popular sales shopping items this year will be electricals and clothing.”
In other research Hitwise, revealed that the number of UK consumers searching for post-Christmas sales online more than trebled during the 2007 holiday period. There were 249% more UK Internet searches for the term ‘sales’ for the week ending 29 December 2007 than for the comparable week in 2006. There was also a 200% increase in searches for the term ‘sale’ over the same period.
The internet site that benefitted most from the search for sales was Play.com, the online entertainment retailer received over a quarter of all UK Internet traffic from searches for ‘sales’ and ‘sale’ for the four weeks ending 29 December 2007. As a result, Play.com saw its market share of all UK Internet visits increase by 15% between 22 and 29 December, when it became the 4th most visited Shopping and Classifieds website in the UK.
The second and third most popular websites receiving traffic from UK Internet searches for ‘sale’ were Tesco Direct and Littlewoods. Meanwhile, ‘next sale’ was the most popular search term containing the word ‘sale’ for the four weeks ending 29 December, and was the second fastest moving search during the same period.
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