Apple crushes High Street in UK web shopping stakes

Second best by traffic ... not sales

By Anna Leach • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 24th November 2011 11:42 GMT

Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement

Apple overtook Tesco, Argos and M&S this year to become the second most popular online retail site in the UK. Only Amazon UK beat them for hits in the latest quarterly figures published by IMRG HitsWise.

The frenzy around the launch of the iPhone 4S in September probably drove up the number of people clicking on the Apple site.

The top five UK sites for online retail – as measured by traffic – are: 1. Amazon, 2. Apple, 3. Argos, 4. Tesco and 5. Next. M&S (6), John Lewis (9) and Play.com (7) fill out the top 10. Home and Garden online shops did poorly in the last three months, with Homebase and IKEA each dropping several slots, and travel sites suffered too.

The fastest movers this quarter were ASDA Direct (up 23 places), Very.co.uk (+19), Ticketmaster (+16), H&M (+15).

Toys R Us was a surprising success story – rising 15 places to 48th and receiving a high share of traffic from people searching for toys, including Lego and Peppa Pig. ®

Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement