High street retailers received over half of all UK Internet visits to online retailers during October (based on two Hitwise custom categories consisting of the top 50 high street and non-high street online retailers in the UK, excluding online auctions and ticket retailers). 51.1% of visits were to an online retailer that also has an offline presence while 48.9% were to a retailer without a high street presence.
Traditionally high street retailers receive less online traffic than their pure play online competitors, except during the Christmas and January sales period. In 2006 high street retailers only overtook their online rivals during the peak month of December, but this year they overtook in September and have been widening the gap ever since.

Search engines are the largest source of traffic to both High Street and pure-play retailers online. However, High Street retailers were more successful at gaining traffic from search engines during October, with Search Engines accounting for 37.1% of their upstream traffic compared with 30.4% for the for pure-play online retailers. Email marketing is also an important source of traffic for retailers in the run up to Christmas, with one in 20 visits to a Shopping and Classifieds website coming from web-based email site in October. Analysis from our Experian sister company CheetahMail shows that UK consumers in October spent an average of £85.00 online in response to permissions-based email offers from apparel retailers

The Apparel and Accessories sector has seen the largest online growth of the 19 Hitwise retail sub-sectors, increasing its share of online Shopping and Classifieds visits from 6.6% to 8.4% over the last 12 months. The sector now accounts for one in every 12 Internet visits to the retail sector. The top three Apparel and Accessories retail websites in October were Next.co.uk, Asos.com and Topshop.co.uk, while ‘next’, ‘asos’ and ‘topshop’ were also the three most searched for terms sending traffic to the sector.

Next.co.uk currently has twice the market share of visits and two and a half times as many brand searches its nearest rival, Asos.com. However both Asos.com and Topshop.co.uk have seen a steady growth in visits over the last year. Both sites index highly with females aged 18-24 and capture a higher proportion of traffic from the North West region and London than Next.