Last week we ran a retail webinar as a pre-Christmas planning session, talking about the top trends from last year’s seasonal peaks and what retailers could expect from Christmas 2011.

For those of you that missed the session on Friday, the webinar slides are now available to download; and if you are a Hitwise client you can rewatch the webinar at your leisure through the Hitwise University. I thought I would summarise some of the key takeaways from the webinar in today’s blog, along with our predictions for Christmas 2011.
As the word cloud below highlights nicely, Christmas 2010 was a good year for the electronics industry with Amazon, Play, Apple, Currys, Comet and PC World among the top 100 most visited retailers in the UK.

January 2011 saw the introduction of a VAT rise, which prompted consumers to buy a lot of their big ticket items like laptops and TVs before the new tax came into effect. 2010 was also a big year for 3D TVs, but with year-on-year searches for 3D TVs down by 28% between August 2010 and August 2011, the indications are that the electronics retailers will have a tougher time selling big ticket items this Christmas. Electronic gadgets on the other hand continue to grow in popularity and, as last week’s blog showed, the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad will be two of the leading products consumers are eager to purchase this year.
Looking at the way the dates fall this Christmas gives an indication as to which days are going to be the biggest for online retail traffic. Last year there was a lot of disruption to retail deliveries because of the heavy December snowfall; tThis Christmas consumers are likely to be a bit more organised and want to make their online orders earlier in December. Conveniently, Cyber Sunday and Cyber Monday will fall on the 4th and 5th of December this year, earlier than last year which should lead to new record breaking traffic figures on these two days.

In our data analysis of visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category for December 2010, the days when retailers received the most amount of traffic from email was always on a Wednesday. In particular Wednesday 14th and 21st of December this year will be the most successful for email traffic and a great opportunity for retailers to target their customers.
One of the trends that we’ve observed over the years is that ‘January sales’ are starting earlier and earlier, and this year Christmas Day and Boxing Day are likely to be even bigger for the retail category than ever before. Conversely, this could cannibalise retail traffic in late December and early January as consumers spend their Christmas money earlier.
We’ll be running more webinars between now and Christmas and of course you can follow us on Twitter for the latest data updates.