Not much good news is comes out of the retail industry lately, consumer confidence is at an all-time low and retailers have reported steep declines in revenue. The economic downturn also continues to impact overall visits to online retailers, which was down 7% for the week ending Feb. 21, 2009 as compared to the previous year.

Visits have also declined across the majority of product categories, as depicted below. The map shows the different types of product categories tracked in the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds parent category, the size of the box represents the market share of visits for the week ending Feb. 21, 2009 and the color represents the year-over-year change. The categories in blue experienced an increase in visits over the same week last year – Grocery & Alcohol and Department Stores. The grocery category has attracted more visitors in recent months as while consumers look for weekly specials, recipes and coupons as they opt to eat at home more often to save money. The categories in red, Computers and Music, experienced the largest year-over-year declines at 23% and 22% of visits, respectively.

To help confirm the theory about consumers visiting Grocery websites to help save money, I compared the household incomes of visits for the current period to one year ago. Here we can see that the share of visits to the Grocery & Alcohol category shows an increase in traffic from the less affluent. For the 4 weeks ending Feb 21, 2009, the share of visits from those earning less than $100k reached 81% of the visits to the category as compared to 72% one year ago. Not surprisingly, the biggest decrease came from the segment making over $150k, who may be cutting back on services like online grocery orders and delivery.

If you are interested in more retail trends, please register to receive a copy of our newly published ‘Holiday 2008 Retail Recap’ report.