High street retailers continue to pull ahead of pure plays in online sales
The internet properties of the UK’s top 100 high street retailers received 19.3% more visits during July than the 100 largest online-only retailers, says a new Hitwise report. And it’s the fashion sector that’s fuelling the high street’s growth online…
The speed with which the high street is catching up with and overtaking pure play internet specialists is gathering pace. In July, the number of visits to the websites of the one hundred largest online high street retailers was 19.3% higher than the number of visits to the one hundred largest pure play retailers, says a new Hitwise report ‘Can retailers have a happy Christmas during the credit crunch?’
“High street retailers overtook their online only counterparts for the first time during December 2006, but quickly fell behind again for most of 2007,” explained Robin Goad, Hitwise UK’s research director. “However, when the high street overtook again last Christmas, the gap was even greater than before and during 2008 the online-only retailers only managed to edge ahead during February.”
“Given the 2.6% year-on-year decline in actual physical visits to retailers reported by Experian Footfall for July, it looks like high street retailers will be more reliant than ever on their online operations this Christmas,” Goad noted.
Online fashion retailing is now particularly dominated by major high street brands, which accounted for seven of the top ten websites in the category during June, says the report. “The growth of the online fashion industry has been one of the main contributors to the increasing market share of high street retailers online,” says Robin Goad.
“However, there are exceptions to the rule. ASOS was the second most visited website in our ‘Shopping and Classifieds — Apparel and Accessories’ category in July 2008. UK Internet traffic to online-only fashion retailers has more than doubled over the last 12 months.”
In addition to major high street brands such as Next, Top Shop and River Island, the top 10 online fashion retailers in June also included two other remote shopping specialists, M and M Direct and Boden.
