HITWISE UK CHRISTMAS SHOPPING UPDATE #3

eBay achieves highest ever market share of visits

London, 7^th December 2005
With just 18 shopping days to go until Christmas, the online retail sector continues to perform strongly in the UKwith the sector reaching its highest peak to date last week, reports Hitwise – the leading online competitive intelligence service.

The Hitwise UK Shopping & Classifieds category reached 14.83% market share for the week ending December 3rd, a 4% increase on the previous week and 13% growth on the same week in 2004. This mirrors the trend from last year, when the week ending 4^th December 2004was the strongest performing week online.

Earlier this year, Hitwise predicted that visits to retail websites would peak the week of the 3^rd December. Whilst visits to retail sites have already passed last year’s high, Hitwise also predicted the online retail sector would grow 25% in share of visits from July to December 2005. “Now that we have full month data available for November, we see the sector has actually grown 26% in this period alone, cementing a fantastic couple of months for online retail in the UK”, said Heather Hopkins, Director of Research for Hitwise UK.

eBay Continues To Dominate Online Retailing in the UK

Whilst no surprise that eBay continues to be the most visited retail website in the UK, it reinforced its supreme dominance of the UKonline market last week by achieving its highest market share of all categories over the past 15 months – reaching 5.79% share of online visits. This represents an increase of 37% in traffic from the same week in 2004, with the uplift in visits to online retail sites undoubtedly driven by eBay UKwhose traffic peaks earlier than most other online retailers.

Two of the most popular product searches sending visits to eBay UK for the 4 weeks ending December 3^rd were ‘psp’ and ‘xbox 360’. Shortage of the Xbox 360 in the UKhad led to fears that it would spark a bidding war on eBay, and this now seems to be the case. Reports indicate that hundreds are appearing on the auction site and selling for more than double the retail price.

Pure play retailers dominate the top 5 most visited online retailers

eBay leads the pack of pure play retailers who dominated four out of the top 5 most visited retail spots for the week ending 3^rd December. eBay received 33.24% of visits to online shopping sites last week, followed by Amazon in second place with 6% share, Play.com with 1.54% share and Kelkoo with 1.40% share of visits.

However, the good news for traditional bricks and mortar retailers who have been struggling on the high street is that their online arms are continuing to perform well.  Accounting for half of the top 20 most visited shopping websites in the UKlast week, Argoswas the most visited website, followed by Tesco, Currys and Comet.

Sign Up For the Hitwise Analyst Weblog

In addition to the UK Christmas Shopping Series 2005 weekly instalments, Heather Hopkins will provide further retail analyses via her weblog at http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-hopkins/.  

Weekly Market Share of UK Visits to Shopping & Classifieds Websites
April 2004 – December 2005

Weekly Market Share of UK Visits to eBay UK September 2004 – December 2005

Weekly Christmas Shopping Tracker:

Top 20 Shopping & Classifieds websites rank by UKvisits, week ending 3rd December 2005

* Does not include stand-alone visits to other eBay sites (eBay.com, eBay Motors, My eBay)

** Does not include stand-alone visits to other Tesco sites (Tesco Register, Tesco Superstore, Tesco Electrical)

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.

By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites.  Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as affiliate programs, search marketing, online advertising, content development and lead generation.

Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. 

More information about the Hitwise Competitive Intelligence service is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis on online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com.

For media enquiries, please contact:

Jannie Cahill
jannie.cahill@hitwise.com

Tel: 020 7378 3619