June 17 2008

US consumers look to coupons

The US market is starting to get more and more price aware, as the number of visits to coupon sites increases

What happens in the US normally happens in the UK six months later, and the current trend looks like a lot of purse tightening, according to Hitwise US visits to coupon websites have increased 56 Percent from 2007.

The weekly share of US visits to a custom category of coupon websites have increased 56 percent for the week ending June 6, 2008, as compared to the same week last year, according to Hitwise. Coupons.com received the largest market share of visits within the category at 29 percent, with its market share increasing 190 percent from the same week last year. Coupon Mountain and Eversave followed with 14 and 6 percent, respectively.

Search engines accounted for 20 percent of the traffic referred to coupon sites and among the top 250 search terms driving traffic to the coupon websites, 60 percent of the search queries include a specific retailer brand or branded product. The remaining queries were split between generic searches for terms such as 'grocery coupons' and 'promo codes' and navigation by the names of coupon websites.

"Rising gas prices and tightened budgets have many consumers using the Internet to help save money while shopping online and off. Retailers can entice purchases by making discounts available to price-conscious consumers as the cost of living continues to increase," said Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise. "While discretionary income is shrinking for some households, consumers are still shopping online, but making sure that they find the best deals."

Additional cost-cutting trends in retail

• US visits to comparison shopping websites increased 51 percent for the week ending June 6, 2008, as compared to last year.
• US visits to discount retailers have increased 25 percent for the week ending June 6, 2008, while traditional department stores have increased 15 percent as compared to the week ending June 9, 2008.
• US searches on the term 'coupons' sending visits to Shopping & Classifieds websites doubled for the week ending June 6, 2008 as compared to the previous year.

Additionally the market share of US visits to the Shopping & Classifieds category increased 26 percent in May 2008 compared to May 2007. Additionally, consumers are selling and buying good through classifieds websites. The Classifieds sub-category experienced the largest year-over-year growth in monthly market share of visits among the all of the Shopping & Classifieds categories.

by Marcus Austin (Web Editor)