Despite the recent dotcom fallout, which included CD retailer Boxman and beauty products site Eve.com amongst its casualties, the number of people visiting retail websites in the UK is on the increase. The latest figures from MMXI Europe place the number of unique users at 4.4m in September, compared to just 2.5m in January.
This represents a 72% increase in visits to retail sites so far this year. Online shoppers’ favourite remains bookseller Amazon.co.uk and its US sister Amazon.com, which combined received a total of 1.8m unique visits during September, almost a quarter of all visits.
Its nearest competitors trail behind: Shopsmart.com, in second place, was visited by 307,000 during last month; and Jungle.com, received 284,000 visits during the period. For the first time traditional retailers WHSmith and Argos.co.uk entered the top ten retail sites, netting around 200,000 unique visits each, and adding diversity to the online environment, according to Mari Kim Coleman, UK managing director of MMXI Europe.
“It is encouraging to see people going to the sites of high street retailers like Argos and WHSmith, as well as those of the well known internet brands. This could be an indication that the UK market has reached a new level of maturity and diversity in online shopping behaviour,” she said.
The domination of a few big names across the internet shows no signs of abating, however, if a recent study of dotcom ad revenues in the US is anything to go by. The latest research from the Internet Advertising Bureau has found that almost a quarter of all US dotcom ad revenues are going to the top ten sites, 83% to the top 25 and 91% to the top 50.
Tom Hyland, who chairs PriceWaterhouseCoopers new media group, which conducts the survey, said: “A significant finding of this report is that online advertising continued to increase in the midst of a turbulent phase of the medium’s growth, and that advertising became more concentrated in the higher profile sites and portals, signalling that the smart money is going where the traffic is.”
MMXI Europe: 020 7563 1600 Internet Advertising Bureau: www.iab.net
