During the Holiday Season, Hitwise found that U.S. traffic to shopping web sites reached its highest point for 2003, with the retail sector accounting for 7.54% of all online traffic for December
2003. This represents a 9.6% increase in market share to shopping sites since November 2003, and a 47% increase since January 2003. The Shopping categories which experienced the largest increase in
market share of online retail traffic between November and December include Flowers & Gifts (an increase of 27.9%), Rewards & Directories (+17.6%), Office Supplies (+16.9%), Appliances & Electronics
(+11.3%) and Grocery & Alcohol (+8.8%). 26.5% of traffic to shopping sites originated from Search Engines & Directories and Hitwise Search Terms Analysis for December found that 9% of all successful
searches on the web resulted in visits to retail sites.
