New York, NY (November 25 2015) — The decision by Amazon to begin Black Friday discounts before November 27 has paid off with the online giant achieving a 12% rise in U.S. traffic, according to global leader in digital analytics, SimilarWeb.
The retailer was one of the first to start its Black Friday sales more than a week ahead of Black Friday, on November 20. The U.S site achieved a 12% rise in one-day spike in traffic on November 22, in comparison to average visits over three previous Sundays. The site also saw an 8% increase in time spent on site by visitors, a 4% increase of pages per visit, and a 16% rise in total pageviews through its early strike for customers.
Online-only sites winning battle for online shopping engagement
The boost for Amazon’s strategy comes as SimilarWeb, has released a report today revealing that U.S. consumers will spend on average 22% longer shopping on sites, such as Amazon and eBay, which offer customers an exclusively online service. In contrast, U.S. brick and mortar retailers are losing the battle for e-commerce customer engagement to these “online-only” shopping sites.
The analysis, which looks at an index of leading U.S. retailers shows online-only eBay secured a market-leading average customer session of 10 minutes 39 seconds among US shoppers. Amazon kept customers engaged for 8:50 minutes, followed by Zulily (8:48 minutes) and Etsy (8:33 minutes). In contrast, the lowest engaging multi-channel retailer’s site kept shoppers on their website for half this time — at 4:31 minutes. Even the best performing multi-channel sites, Kohl’s and IKEA, averaged 7:49 minutes per session – almost 2 minutes less than Amazon and eBay.
Hilla Meller, SimilarWeb Digital Insights Manager, said: “The appetite for early deals is strong, with Amazon seeing a huge spike in pre-Black Friday traffic. It is also benefiting from a further rise in already high levels of engagement with customers.
“The average time spent on a website is a strong indicator of engagement and an an important predictor of the site’s ability to convert visitors into buyers. On average, we have found desktop visitors spend more time browsing online-only sites than on multi-channel competitors.”
“Online-only sites get more steady traffic throughout the year and appear to have hit upon a more enticing formula for keeping customers engaged.”