• by Ross Fadner , December 7, 2003

If October traffic is any indication, Americans are going online to shop this holiday season, but they appear to be looking for bargains. The most trafficked retail sites were auction destinations (34.7 percent of all retail site traffic), followed by rewards sites (11.99 percent). The findings, which come from the December 2003 edition of the Hitwise Online Retail Report, provide a further indication that Americans U.S. users are in the mood to shop, they're just looking for good deals.

Overall retail traffic to shopping and classifieds shows accounted for 5.98 percent of all U.S. Internet traffic in October, a 10.33 percent increase over July 2003.

The report, which offers the most comprehensive view yet of online retail behavior leading of the 2003 holiday shopping season, shows that retail sites accounted for 12 percent of all page requests in October 2003. In fact, shopping and classifieds sites comprised 8 percent of all successful searches, while 27.5 percent of all shopping and classifieds traffic came from search engines.

eBay, of course, plays no small part in the share of auction traffic. The auction site's dominance is underscored by 28.96 percent of all retail market visits and 45.5 percent of all retail market pages. Amazon.com was next in line, with a market share of 4.44 percent of all visits and 3.69 percent of all pages. eBay Motors ranked third with a 1.74 percent share of visits and a 2.03 percent share of pages. These rankings are unchanged since July 2003.

Among the most popular retail sites for October 2003, the longest average time spent by each user per session was eBay Motors at 15:28, followed by BestBuy's 9:50, QVC 9:32, and Amazon.com 8:54.

While many of the results for October 2003 reflect no change since July 2003, there were still signs of early holiday shopping reflected by market share changes for certain categories. The Hitwise sub-categories which received the largest increases from July through October were Toys and Hobbies, up 38.46 percent, and Flowers and Gifts, up 36.36 percent. Visits to apparel and accessories sites also increased by 22.86 percent.

Wholesale and Relationship sales witnessed the largest decrease in traffic since July, falling 20.59 percent. Automotive was also down 4.55 percent, as well as computer and book site traffic, down 2.78 and 2.17 percent respectively.

Hitwise finds that the demographic profile of online retail shoppers skews slightly female and over the age of 35. Online shoppers are 51.58 percent female and 48.42 percent male; they are also mostly over the age of 35: 27.75 percent of retail site visitors are between 35 and 44 years old. One of the more surprising findings shows that adults aged 55 and older account for 19.15 percent of online retail shoppers while 18-24 year olds comprise 18.75 percent, further evidence that the Internet is now penetrating the seniors market too. Other results show that California, Texas, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania have the most online retail shoppers among the 50 states.

As a special offer to MediaDailyNews subscribers, Hitwise is offering the entire 21-page report available as a free download at http://www.hitwise.com/contact/2003_rr.html?ac=mediapost .