370 popular e-commerce sites analysed

Internet Retailing

20th Apr 2017

Which e-commerce verticals have been most successful in drawing traffic? How are the different e-commerce verticals shaping up in terms of engagement?

Metisa has compared the growth, engagement and sources of traffic for 370 popular e-commerce sites in Asia across five e-commerce verticals:

• Fashion
• Home & Electronics
• Beauty
• Luxury
• Food & Groceries

It sourced data about traffic and engagement from SimilarWeb, a third-party, independent source which uses local internet service providers, monitored devices, web crawlers and direct measurement sources to estimate traffic data, time on site, bounce rate and other metrics.

Based on this data, Metisa found that food and groceries was the fastest-growing industry over the past six months at 25 per cent, while the beauty sector was the only to see negative growth.

Consumers spent the most time on websites selling food and groceries and homewares and electronics, though if you consider bounce rate and pages viewed, food and groceries was the most engaging sector overall.

“Companies in the Food & Groceries vertical have more minutes spent on site and pages visited. This matches a pattern where customers have more products in their basket and hence visit many pages to find all the groceries they need,” Metisa wrote.

“The Home & Electronics vertical sees high minutes on site but low pages per view. This could mean that customers visit ecommerce sites with an idea of what particular piece of furniture or gadget they want and spend time reading product details and reviews instead of browsing through the site to seek inspiration.

“This kind of buying behaviour may be due to the high cost of furniture and electronics, which are typically not impulse buys.”

Metisa also compared the main sources of traffic for each vertical, analysing whether direct traffic, display traffic, referral traffic, mail traffic, search traffic or social traffic played a bigger role.

For the fashion vertical, for instance, direct, display and social traffic were the biggest sources of web traffic over the past six months, indicating the importance of visuals in that space.

See Metisa’s full article for more details.