A report from Jupiter Media Metrix Inc. indicated that traffic at online shopping sites was up 50 percent this past holiday season over the same period in the year 2000.
The New York-based market research firms Holiday 2001 E-Commerce Series study, released today, said that on average 51.3 million unique Web patrons visited online shopping sites each week from the week ended Nov. 25 through the week ended Dec. 23.
After a strong start to the season in November, the Web sites of traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers benefited the most from the traffic increase with the top seven bricks-and-mortar retailers sites experiencing a 73 percent increase in traffic, the report said. The top three were Columbia House Sites with 598,000 average daily unique visitors; Toysrus.com (which has a partnership with Amazon.com) with 515,000; and Barnesandnoble.com with 447,000.
Amazon.com however remained the top online retail site with 2.5 million unique visitors per day, up from 1.6 million in the 2000 holiday shopping season. Walmart.com, the top bricks-and-mortar site in the 2000 holiday shopping season slipped from eighth place to 12th place overall, though its average daily unique visits went up from 370,000 to 434,000.
eBay remained the top visited shopping site overall with 4.5 million average daily visitors, up from 2.6 million in 2000.
The Jupiter Media Metrix numbers are based on a sample of 60,000 individuals throughout the United States.