Bulk of visits to leading UK retailer sites come from mobile, data shows

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Analysis of how consumers shop online in the UK reveals that the majority of visits to the top 25 online retailers in Q1 2016 came via mobile (2 million) as opposed to desktop (1.6 million). This is down 5.18% from Q4 2015 with desktop up 5.18%.

The figures come from analysis by Pepper.com, a global social commerce network, of Similar Web data. British consumers made 3.6 billion visits to the top 25 online retailers in Q1 2016, with Amazon.co.uk and eBay.co.uk still being the most popular internet retailers after leading the table in 2015. Amazon recorded 1.2 billion visits in Q1 2016, up 6.7% from Q4 2015 and eBay recorded growth of 20.9% with 1.1 billion visits recorded for the first quarter of this year.

The online retailer with the most growth was B&Q with 38.2 million visits, up 35.23% on Q4 2015, with Very.co.uk recording the highest loss with visitors down 27.82%.

However, Very.co.uk recorded the highest mobile share with 72.05% (24.2 million visits), followed closely by New Look with a 70.43% share (27.5 million visits) and Argos 69.17% (118.9 million visits).

Ebuyer.com recorded the highest desktop share with 62.49% (11 million visits) followed by Ocado.com with 59.92% (6.5 million visits) and Asos 51.74% (86 million visits).

Most of the visits to the top 25 online retailers for Q1 2016 came from direct traffic, with 1.6 billion visits (42.61% share) coming from direct type-ins. The second highest source of visits came from organic searches, which contributed 1.05 billion visits (28.9% share). Referrals from third party websites accounted for 709 million visits (19.45% share). Paid searches accounted for 134 million visits (3.68% share).

eBay.co.uk recorded the highest number of visits from direct type-ins with 564.7 million visits coming from visitors making the direct type-in (51.34%), followed by Ebuyer.com with 8.9 million visits (50.78%) and Amazon.co.uk with 531.2 million visits (45.25%).

The retailer with the biggest share of visits coming from organic searches was Homebase with 15.8 million visits (69.85%) followed by Boots with 35.9m visits (58.82%) and B&Q with 20.4 million visits coming from organic searches (53.35%).

Ticketmaster received most of its traffic from referrals with 5.1 million visits coming from other websites (27.21%), followed by eBay.co.uk with 257.1 million visits (23.38%) and Ocado with 2.5m visits (22.83%).

Interestingly, only 2.7% of all visits came from social media, down 0.25% on Q4 2015 with traffic from social media contributing 97 million visits.

Etsy.com received the biggest share of visits from social media platforms with 4.4 million visits (11.38% share) coming from sites such as Twitter and Pinterest. Groupon received the second highest number of visits from social media platforms with 2.4 million visits (5.36%) share followed by Asos with 7.7 million visits (4.62%).

Looking at a combination of traffic from all sources such as referrals, paid searches and social media most visits to the top 25 online retailers in Q1 2016 came from Google with over 1 billion visits coming from the search engine giant (30.29% traffic share). This was followed by eBay.com with 110 million visits coming from this website (3.02% traffic share) and HotUKDeals, which contributed 89.4 million visits to the top 25 online retailers (2.45% traffic share).

However eBay.com appears as a referring website for ebay.co.uk, but does not appear in the statistics for other retailers. Facebook followed HotUKDeals with 56 million visits coming from the social media platform (1.54% traffic share).

Ebay.com was the biggest referral site with 110 million visits (3.02% share) followed by HotUKDeals with 89.4 million visits.

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