Though for most traditional retailers, e-commerce still only represents a fraction of their overall business, the rate at which online sales continues to grow has them ramping up their digital capabilities. And the latest report from SimilarWeb provides a glimpse into how far they’ve come and how much opportunity remains.
The digital market intelligence platform creates a quarterly ranking of the businesses that have the top mobile and desktop traffic in the U.S. The report, which covers January through March, highlighted site visits across seven categories, including consumer electronics, insurance, airlines and banking.
Amazon not only topped the list for general merchandise stores, its traffic far exceeded that of any other company. The e-commerce behemoth raked in an average of 1.87 billion visits each month. Amazon’s traffic represented 54.1% of the category, which is a 1.4% increase over the prior year period. As a result of the company growth, every other business on the list lost share except eBay and Costco, which each eked out a 0.1% gain.
By comparison, eBay, which ranked No. 2 on the general merchandise list, saw 817.6 million visitors a month during the quarter, which equaled 23.7% of the market. Walmart landed in the third slot with 339 million monthly visitors and a 9.8% share. Etsy (120.4 million visits) and Target (117.4 million) each command about 3.5% of the market, while the bottom five (Aliexpress, Costco, Kohl’s, Wish and Sears) each represent about 1 percent or less.
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While mobile represented roughly 58 percent of the group’s traffic on average, 64 percent of Walmart’s visits were on mobile as was 81 percent of the traffic to Wish.
Search delivered 26.4% of the visitors for this group, of which 80 percent was for a particular brand.
In the apparel category specifically, Macy’s came out on top with an average of 55.9 million visits a month. Of the top 10 apparel retailers, the department store represented 24.4% of the traffic in this sector. Its closest competitor was J.C. Penney, which garnered half of the traffic at 28.8 million visits a month and a 12.5% share. Nordstrom (27 million visitors) and Nike (25 million) bumped Zulily down two notches from the prior year period to No. 6 with 16.5 million average visits. Zappos, Forever 21, Foot Locker and Victoria’s Secret rounded out the top 10.
On average, 56 percent of the overall traffic for this category came from mobile, though it represented 82 percent of traffic for Foot Locker.
Social media continues to play an important part in apparel sales with traffic from these sites delivering 26 percent more visits in March than January. Facebook alone drove 47 percent of social traffic.