eBay tops retail page view charts in UK

Monday, July 19, 2010 - 12:18 by Graham Miller

In the first week of July this year the online retail site receiving the greatest proportion of visitors was eBay, which outpaced its rival Amazon by a considerable margin.

21.32 per cent of all visitors to online shopping outlets viewed eBay, which acts as a marketplace for sellers to publicise their goods and for individuals to sell their unwanted items via an auction system.

Amazon took second place with just under six per cent of visitors, although it seems that in the UK the site is less popular than in the US, with Amazon.com taking 15.47 per cent of visitors stateside.

UK consumers put the online store of popular high street and catalogue retailer Argos into third place that week with 1.86 per cent of the total and the US equivalent of eBay's site was bumped into fourth place with 1.17 per cent of visitors, just ahead of Play.com which had 1.13 per cent of the market at the start of the month.

Surprisingly it was only in the US that eBay did not take pole position, according to the figures published by Experian Hitwise. In Australia, Singapore and the UK the auction and retail site was at the top of the charts, whilst in the US it did not even make it into the top five, which was dominated by high street brands.

The figures might suggest that a US audience looking for safe shopping online is more likely to turn to the established brand names such as Walmart and Best Buy in order to fulfil their retail needs, with online-only engendering less in the way of trust than in other regions.

In the UK it is clear that safe shopping online has been resoundingly delivered by many ecommerce firms and consumer confidence in retailers offering a secure experience is clearly evidenced in the traffic statistics.