One popular topic that comes up each year during the holiday season is comparing the amount of traffic to the websites of brick & mortar retailers to the online-only players. In order to perform the analysis, we created 2 custom categories of retail websites (excluding auctions, classifieds, video rentals, and membership clubs) of the top 100 ranked by market share. To date during this holiday season, the websites of the brick & mortar retailers are attracting a greater market share of visits than the top 100 Web-only retailers, which has historically been the case during the past 3 years.

While the brick & mortar retailers capture a larger share of visits, the Web-only retailers have experienced year-over-year increases in daily visits, particularly on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. In the weeks leading up to and following the Thanksgiving holiday, the web-only retailers had 15 days of YoY increases, while the brick & mortar players had only 2 out of the 20.

In order to understand who is driving the growth for the online-only retailers, I used our new Demographics & Lifestyle tool to compare the audiences between the two custom categories. Basic demographics illustrated no major differences between in gender, age, and household income. For a more detailed analysis, also done by my colleague Robin in the UK, I used the Experian Mosaic profiles of each of the custom categories to see if there are specific segments that prefer to visit online-only retailers over the websites of the brick & mortar retailers. The analysis is based upon the difference in the share of visits between the two categories for each segment, which is then ranked in ascending order. On the left side, we have the segments that tend to prefer the online-only retailers in orange. The right side then shows the segments that prefer the brick & mortar websites in the blue.

The Young Cosmopolitans segment emerged as the segment that most preferred the online-only retailers, which is not surprising considering they tend to be a more tech-forward, early adopter crowd online. This segment is described as heavy buyers of tech products that spend a lot of free time online, checking out social networking websites. Other segments that are popular for the web-only players, Stable Careers and Urban Commuter Families were also those likely to be more pressed for time from work obligations and seek the convenience of online shopping.
The top segment for the brick & mortar retail websites, Struggling City Centers, have a lower proclivity to online purchasing, so this group relies more on the websites to research future in-store purchases. Each of these segments, Family Convenience and Prime Middle America, purchase some categories online, so these highlight the multi-channel customers that are purchasing both online and off.
For additional descriptions of the Mosaic segments can be found here and more information about how the data is collected and used for segmentation here.