The weather has got noticeably nicer in the UK over the past couple of weeks. The days are lighter, the sun is shining and the first BBQs have been enjoyed.

Online, the first optimistic signs of summer are usually greeted with a spike in searches for three products: garden furniture, barbecues and lawn mowers.

You can see from the chart above that in the last month there has been a significant uplift in searches for these three summer products. In particular, searches for barbecues have increased by 250% in the last four weeks.
Of the three products mentioned, searches for garden furniture are consistently the most popular, with almost twice the volume of searches for barbecues or lawn mowers. Combining our data with some Met Office figures, you can see in the graph below how UK Internet visits to garden furniture retailers correlate with the increasing temperatures in the spring months.

Last year there was a peak in visits to garden furniture retailers in April, when the weather was getting warmer but before the real summer season started. This year that trend looks set to be even more significant, with year-on-year visits to the top garden furniture retail websites up by 5.3%. The other indicator is that average temperatures in 2011 have been hotter than in 2010. Consumers clearly want to make the most of the warm weather in the garden.
With so much time spent outside, the need to keep lawns trim is a growing priority for consumers. What’s interesting (though perhaps not surprising if you read my blog about snow chains) is that Amazon is currently the number one recipient of all traffic from searches for lawn mowers.

Despite a huge range of specialists online who sell lawn mowers, Amazon has become the destination UK Internet users visit the most to buy a new mower, with 6.23% of all search clicks for lawn mower searches (albeit with a relatively high paid rate of 65%). The list of products Amazon doesn’t specialise in these days grows very thin indeed.
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