Top retail sites earn major mobile visitor numbers

Tuesday, April 26, 2016 - 09:42 by Paul Tissington

Twenty five of the UK’s biggest retailers have had their site traffic analysed to determine the types of devices that customers are using to carry out safe shopping online.

The Similar Web report revealed that, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is smartphone visits which make up the biggest chunk of the traffic for the majority of these companies, although there are variances which show differing habits across popular e-commerce sites.

The retailer to see the biggest proportion of visits originate from mobile devices was Very.co.uk, with 72 per cent of people choosing to view its pages from smartphones. This put it just ahead of fashion outlet, New Look, which saw a 70 per cent slice of its traffic go to mobile devices.

Conversely, there are still some retailers which tend to muster more attention from desktop computer users, with the most prominent example being electronics outlet, Ebuyer. Sixty two per cent of its customers still choose to visit from PCs and laptops, rather than smartphones and tablets, although the dominance of traditional computers does seem to be diminishing even here.

About 42 per cent of all visits to sites offering safe shopping online in the first three months of 2016 came about directly, meaning people either entered the web address of a retailer’s site or used a bookmark in their browser, without coming through from a third party platform.

Twenty nine per cent of visits were spurred on by search engines, while just under a fifth came as a result of referrals from other shopping sites, including eBay.

Amazon remained the most visited site in the UK, ahead of eBay in second place and Gumtree in third. And although these pure play e-commerce sites may be leading the market, the rest of the top 25 is mostly made up of high street brands.