High Street Retailers Over Take Pure Online Retailers

Hitwise has put together some interesting stats on the presence of the online versions of bricks and mortar brands against the pure-play internet ventures. And their analysis makes interesting reading.

These statistics show that 51.1% of visits during October where to the high-street brands online (i.e. Argos, M&S and Next) whilst 48.9% were to the internet-online operations such as Amazon, Dell and ASOS.

Hitwise's view is that there is a seed-change in how consumers buy online. Last year the relative share of traffic was the other way around during the pre-Christmas period. My view is that there have been significant levels of ad spend by these large brands - you see adverts for M&S, John Lewis etc everywhere. Whilst ad-spend for pure-play has been less significant.

I don't necessarily see that there is a significant change in how consumers naturally perceive the two types of retailers, I just think that the ability to spend millions offline on seasonal advertising has won the day.

They also say that Search engines are the largest source of traffic for pure-play concerns, but not in the January and Christmas sales period. They don't say where this traffic comes from, but I'd suspect email marketing and affiliate "discount code" sites.

But looking at search traffic more closely they show that 37.1% of High-Street brands traffic came from search engines, whilst that was only 30.4% from pure-play. I'd hate to think how much of that 37.1% came from closed group brand bidding :-(. Millions upon millions wasted.

But we shouldn't forget email marketing. It's something I've got more involved with this year. According to Hitwise 5% of visits to shopping sites came from email accounts. Whilst CheetahMail says that an average of £85 per person is spent at Christmas as a result of email marketing.

Here's the chart: