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Amazon and Asos lead retailer traffic growth as ecommerce dominates 2020 web use

Ecommerce sites have boomed in 2020 (Image: The UK Domain)

Ecommerce sites have boomed in 2020 (Image: The UK Domain)

The shift to online living during the pandemic that impacted most of 2020 has seen a huge shift towards ecommerce sites, with Amazon leading the charge and Asos seeing the biggest growth.

Revealing the top 100 websites of 2020 , The UK Domain has found that while Google dominates – with 31.2 billion visits from the UK in 2020 – many retailers are also high on the list. Amazon and eBay come in at numbers 6 and 8 with 6,49 billion and 4.64 billion visits respectively, while Argos hits the number 20 spot, out-performing the BBC (31)  and Tesco (47).

Out of the whole top 100, ecommerce websites have appeared most in the top 100 than any other type of website. Websites such as Amazon, eBay and Argos all witnessed dramatic traffic increases in 2020, accounting for 14% of total UK traffic in the top 100.

Amazon in particular jumped 40% compared with the previous year increasing in traffic by almost 13billion, while Asos saw sales growth of 26% – which according to its own results has seen a 23% increase in revenue equalling almost £1.4 billion, including UK sales up by 36% equaling to £554 million.

Asos witnessed an increase of website traffic in the UK moving from 98th place in 2019 to 87th place in 2020. In 2018, Asos hadn’t yet broken into the top 100, however this changed in 2019 as they recorded an impressive 227million in UK website traffic.

However, in 2020 Asos reported an incredible 289million in website traffic in the UK alone, an additional 62million compared with the previous year. 

Search engines see the biggest year yet

On a larger scale, search engines have seen an impressive increase in movement, accounting for a massive 27% of total UK traffic to the top 100 in 2020, says the study. This includes websites such as Bing.com, Google.com, Yahoo.com and Duckduckgo.com, the latter of which appeared in the top 100 for the first time.

As Duckduckgo.com claims to offer privacy protection when online searching, and as people become more aware of their online digital footprint and how large companies are tracking more of their behaviour, this could explain the increase in their UK traffic.

“Digging deeper into the report of the top 100 websites in 2020, we can conclude how the Coronavirus pandemic has changed our behaviours online,” says Sam Jefferies , the Search Marketing Lead at Nominet and the UK Domain. “From interior-related e-commerce websites popping up into the top 100 for the first time, and travel taking a huge hit, we look into how the pandemic has changed the way we use the internet.”

According to Jefferies, these changes in internet behaviours have impacted on certain industries and affected their website traffic in different ways.

“For example,” he says, “ the UK Government website’s traffic has increased by 414million since 2019, a result of the new government legislation in regards to the Covid pandemic and the British public’s need to stay up to date. In response small businesses have also had to become more resilient during lockdown restrictions.”

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