Around this time last year we reported that post-Christmas sales searches had trebled; a couple of weeks ago we noted that this year the increase was just 3.2%. However, if Christmas 2007 was the year that online sales went mainstream, this year it was the turn of discount vouchers. As the chart below illustrates, the volume searches for ‘vouchers’ is still less than that for ‘sale’ or ‘sales’, but it is catching up fast. UK Internet searches for vouchers peaked on the week ending December 13th, and were up a massive 143% on the previous year.

Looking at a shorter time period – i.e. the weekly data from the last couple of months – the distinction between pre- and post-Christmas bargain hunting behaviour becomes clear. Voucher searches peaked in the middle of December, while sales searches dramatically spike after Christmas. The variation in voucher searches is also notably less, implying that sales searches only have a limited lifespan, while vouchers are more consistent.

One product of the growth in voucher searches has been the emergence of specialist voucher sites, such as HotUKDeals and My Voucher Codes. The chart below illustrates the extent to which retail sites have come to rely on voucher sites. In December, a typical retail site received 1 in every 140 visits from a voucher site, up from 1 in 200 only a couple of months before.

But who is getting all this voucher traffic? The retail sub sectors that are most reliant on voucher sites are those selling entertainment products – both hardware (electronics, computers) and software (DVDs, music and video games). Here are the top 10 retailers that received traffic from voucher sites during December:
1. Amazon UK (which picked up 3.3% of downstream visits from voucher sites)
2. Argos (3.0%)
3. Play.com (2.8%)
4. eBay UK (1.9%)
5. Dixons Online (1.2%)
6. Tesco Direct (1.1%)
7. Comet UK (1.0%)
8. Tesco.com (0.9%)
9. Currys (0.9%)
10. John Lewis (0.9%)
While entertainment and electronics retailers do best from discount vouchers, department stores and fashion retailers benefit most from the sales. ‘Next sale’ is always the top term during sales season and over the last 12 weeks has accounted for almost 1 in every 20 sales searches. Other fashion related searches in the top 20 over this period included: Debenhams, BHS, M&S, ASOS, Boden, Monsoon and River Island.
This topic and others are discussed in more depth in our recent post-Christmas retail webinar. You can listen to a recording here.
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