New Zealanders beat shopping queues online

Press Release
Hitwise.co.nz

New Zealanders beat shopping queues online

Traffic to online Shopping and Classifieds sites builds in the lead up to Christmas

18 December 2000 – With Christmas just a week away, Internet monitoring service Hitwise has recorded a steady increase in the volume of New Zealand Internet users visiting ‘Shopping and Classifieds” websites. Data for the week ending 9 December shows that the category captured 2.99% of all traffic for the week, up from 2.52% in the past four weeks.

Looking exclusively at the domestic market (i.e. New Zealand websites only), the ‘Shopping & Classifieds’ category has also increased its share of traffic, currently receiving 12.08% of all traffic viewed by New Zealand Internet users, compared with 9.93% throughout the past four weeks.

New Zealand’s E-tailers have proven to be fairly competitive against international offerings, with over 36% of Shopping-related traffic visiting local websites last week. This is an improvement on November figures, which showed just over 34% of all traffic going to New Zealand sites.

New Zealanders support local ‘Video and Games’ shopping sites

The different sub-categories within ‘Shopping and Classifieds’ have various degrees of success in competing with overseas e-tailers. One notable sector is the ‘Video and Games’ sub-category, where over 75% of traffic for the week ending 9 December was to local sites. This is in contrast to book-related sites, where over 90% of New Zealand traffic went off-shore in the same period.

Not surprisingly, the ‘Groceries and Alcohol’ sub-category is dominated by New Zealand sites (96.16%), with ‘House and Garden’ (63.20%) and ‘Health and Beauty’ (63.07%) sites also performing well in this context.

All under one roof in cyberspace

Just like their offline counterparts, online Department stores, which offer access to a range of products from a single location, are proving most successful with New Zealand Internet users. Of the seventeen ‘Shopping and Classifieds’ sub-categories, ‘Department Stores’ is the most popular, attracting almost 14% of all shopping-related traffic last week.

The ‘Classifieds’ and ‘Online Auctions’ sub-categories are the next most popular followed by ‘Books’ (8.66%), with the ‘Apparel and Accessories’ and ‘Groceries and Alcohol’ sub-categories both attracting an equal share of traffic in sixth place (3.31%) and ‘Health and Beauty’ being the least popular.

Amazon the top e-tail destination
Amazon.com is the leading e-tail site for New Zealand Internet audiences, capturing 6.42% of shopping-related traffic for the week ending 9 December. Amazon.com, which also leads the ‘Department’ stores’ category, is followed by www.woolworths.co.nz and retailers of computing products and games, www.gamezone.co.nz and www.dell.com.

Music e-tailers www.cdnow.com and www.soundsnz.com also make the top ten along with www.flyingpig.co.nz in seventh position. Computer retailer Ascent Technology (www.ascent.co.nz) has moved quickly up the list in recent weeks and is the eighth most popular e-tail site with Hallmark.com (www.hallmark.com) and sporting manufacturer, Adidas (www.adidas.com.au) rounding out the top ten.

The top 10 global e-tailing sites visited by New Zealand Internet users for the week ending 9 December are:

1. www.amazon.com
2. www.woolworths.co.nz
3. www.gamezone.co.nz
4. www.dell.com
5. www.cdnow.com
6. www.soundsnz.com
7. www.flyingpig.co.nz
8. www.ascent.co.nz
9. www.hallmark.com
10. www.adidas.com
Source: Hitwise New Zealand (www.hitwise.co.nz)
About Hitwise (www.hitwise.co.nz)
Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service giving web
strategists, agencies and financial analysts real-time insights on the
online competitive environment. Hitwise uses proxy log analysis to monitor
the surfing habits of local Internet users, covering home, work and
educational use. Because Hitwise monitors and reports on more sites, more people every day, only Hitwise can provide insights needed to make timely and effective business decisions.

The creators of Hitwise, Australian-based Sinewave Interactive, have partnered with Brave New World (www.bravenewworld.co.nz), one of New Zealand’s leading online marketing services businesses, to market Hitwise in New Zealand.

Hitwise will soon be launched in Hong Kong, United Kingdom, Korea, South Africa and Japan.

Media Enquiries
Ms Angela Friend
Public Relations Manager
Level 3, 493 St Kilda Rd
Melbourne 3004 Australia
Ph: +61 3 9820 5443
Fax: +61 3 9820 0407
Email: angela@hitwise.com

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