Though Wal-Mart dominates the global brick and mortar retail scene, even it had to watch Amazon surpass it in online traffic.
Amazon.com has become as much a fixture of holiday retail shopping as any store one would care to mention. Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Circuit City – none of those companies enjoyed a bigger percentage of online traffic from US visitors than Amazon did on the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Hitwise pegged Amazon’s market share of US visitors at 10 percent, the only site with a double digit market share out of the Hitwise 100 Retail Index. Wal-Mart paced closely behind with a 9.12 percent share.
No other retail site broke six percent by Hitwise’s analysis. Target reached 5.72 percent, while electronics retail rivals Best Buy (5.59 percent) and Circuit City (3.73 percent) rounded out the top five.
For the day, Hitwise said Cyber Monday traffic rose 26 percent over the same day in 2006. It’s the third year in a row traffic increased on the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Gadgets brought out the visitors in droves. “Traffic to the electronics and video games categories experienced the strongest growth as shoppers searched for products such as GPS navigation systems and Nintendo Wii consoles,” Heather Dougherty, Hitwise director of research, said in a statement.
Hot searched-for electronics included the iconic iPod and the scarce Wii. Microsoft should be pleased to know its Zune media player rated among the top ten product searches per Hitwise analysis for the first time, for the week ending November 24th.
