The gist is that retail websites gain a smaller share of the available time which users are spending online. The graph below illustrates this quite well over the past 3 years; you can see clearly that the blue retail line is on a downward trend whilst the yellow social networks line has shot up significantly.
When you think about it, a lot of this makes sense; people check social network sites all the time to find out what their friends are up to, you only go shopping online when you have a desire to buy something. It's important to say that this graph does not illustrate that retailers get more traffic than they did 3 years ago (!) there has definitely been growth... its just not as fast a growth spike that the likes of social network sites and news /media sites (e.g. YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer site) are achieving nowadays.
Robin goes on to say that way back in July 2006 transactional sites used to attract similar levels of traffic as content websites. Get up to date in July 2009 and you can see a seismic shift in that content (entertainment, social networks and forums, news and media, and lifestyle) websites attract 73% more traffic than their transactional equivalents (transactional includes shopping, travel and finance websites).
People continue to spend more of their time online, and of course shopping is just one of these aspects. From a retail aspect it's important to think that people use the social networks and news sites to inform their purchasing decisions on products, so just because someone is on YouTube doesn't mean they're not viewing a review of the latest Nokia with a view to upgrading.
That's why I'm seeing more and more retailers put serious thought into their own social media strategies at the moment.
Finlay
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1 comments:
Check out this site i used called offerssupermarket.co.uk its really good for searching for those items you need and it searches the lowest price for you.. its ace!
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