[Sydney, AUSTRALIA] Online shopping’s continual growth has accelerated over the festive season, according to the latest figures from Internet monitoring service Hitwise.
Overall traffic to online Shopping and Classifieds-related Web sites rose for the month of December, capturing 3.214 percent of all Australian Internet traffic, driven by Christmas shopping and post-Christmas sales.
According to Hitwise figures, this continues an upward trend in the share of traffic the category has received since July, when it accounted for just 1.749 percent of all traffic.
Hitwise executive director Adrian Giles said that the latest statistics represented good news for Australias online retailers, with over 61 percent of all traffic heading to local sites, rather than international sites.
“In addition to overall increases in traffic to shopping sites, Australian Internet users are increasingly choosing to shop locally,” Giles said. “Since July, the proportion of Internet users visiting Australian shopping sites has increased more than five percent, suggesting local sites are becoming more competitive against international offerings.”
Locally, the top 20 e-tail sites comprised a mix of pure online retailers and ‘clicks and mortar’ businesses. Dstore was the top local e-tailing site for the month, followed by Myer Direct and Wishlist.
