Forget the Chronicles of Narnia, this festive period it’s all been about the Hitwise Christmas Retail Trilogy reports. The big news this December was that visits to retail sites were at their highest ever level, up 4.8% year-on-year.
Across the month, there were over two billion visits and a total of 343m hours spent shopping on these sites. Interestingly, time spent was down from last December, implying that we have become quicker at browsing and buying. What’s Hot has surmised that this is not only because of faster internet speeds and sites with easier navigation, but also because consumers are increasingly confident about buying online.
Boxing Day was the biggest day ever for traffic to retail sites – 96.2m visits, up 19.5% on 2010. According to Hitwise, the large increase was down the fact that Boxing Day was a Monday, traditionally the busiest online day of the week. However as Boxing Day 2011 was a non-working day – traditionally quieter for online shoppers – we’ll have to wait until next year when Boxing Day is on Wednesday to see which is the bigger driving factor for traffic.
Boxing Day searches this December were also interesting. Only a small 0.9% contained the word “sale” or “sales”. In 2011 many retailers started their sales pre-Christmas – and online searches for sales actually started increasing as early as 17th December.
Cyber Monday – the term coined for the busiest online shopping day of the year – fell on December 5th in 2011. As you’d expect, traffic was sky high, exceeding 84m visits, up 18% on 2010. And we did not see the usual trend of falling traffic in the approach to Christmas Day as delivery dates became unattainable. Eager retailers extended delivery dates so much so that the only severe drop was in the week before Christmas.
Within this is the growing platform of m-commerce. This week, IBM reported 11% of all online retail sales in December 2011 originated from mobile devices, doubling from 5.5% a year earlier. Mobile shoppers generated 14.6% of all online sessions on retailer websites, up from 5.6% in December 2010.
Apple’s iPhone and iPad collectively accounted for 9.5%of all mobile device retail traffic last month. In addition, shoppers using the iPad continued to drive more purchases than consumers across other devices, with retail conversion rates reaching 6.3% compared to 3.1% on rival smartphones and tablets.
So is this the final death knell for the high street? In a word, no. You’ll still have some keen bargain-hunters queuing up in the cold on 26th December 2012. That said, the iPad was a big Christmas gift this year once again – and the future of Christmas shopping may well be tablet-shaped.
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