The economic downturn is beginning to have an impact on Internet retail in the UK. Monthly traffic to online retailers fell by 0.5% between October 2007 and 2008, while actual visits to the high street and shopping centers, as reported by Experian Footfall, fell by 2.2% over the same period. Following Heather Dougherty’s example in the US, we’ve created a chart illustrating annual change in traffic to our Shopping and Classifieds category over the last 8 weeks. As you can see below, this has been falling over the last couple of months, and has been negative for the last three weeks.

Last week also saw the opening of the Westfield shopping center in West London. The new mall, conceived in very different economic times, will be the largest inner city shopping center in Europe, and has even had a had a new Tube station created in its honour. The excitement surrounding its opening last Friday fed through to the online world; ‘westfield’ was the eighth fastest moving search term in the UK last week, while ‘westfield shopping centre’ ranked eleventh.
Westfield aims to combine high street and high end retailers under the same roof, so we thought it would be interesting to look at the demographics of visitors to its homepage for the 4 weeks ending November 1st. People aged between 18 and 34 were over represented as visitors to the site, while 54% were women and 48% came from London, with a further 19% from the South East and 17% from the East region.
Looking at the Experian Mosaic segmentation for the site, it looks as if Westfield is succeeding in attracting both affluent and fashionable visitors, at least online. The three Mosaic types most over represented on the homepage during the last 4 weeks were: Global Connections (‘Very affluent, cosmopolitan sophisticates found in extremely expensive housing’), Counter Cultural Mix (‘Young, mobile population in a mix of jobs either in the service economy or in professional employment, in run-down urban areas’), and Asian Enterprise (‘Well-qualified minority groups, many from Asia, living in semi-detached suburban areas’).

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