eBay is the most popular online shopping destination for Australians, followed by Amazon, Kogan.com and Groupon, with OzBargain having grown sharply in recent years, Roy Morgan Research data shows.
Roy Morgan has found that 7.81 million Australians (14+) visited eBay in an average four weeks in the year to June 2016, with Amazon in second place at 3.78 million, followed by Kogan.com (1.35 million) and Groupon (1.32 million).
The figures show both Scoopon (977,000) and Catch Of The Day (971,000) are closing in on the million-a-month mark.
Meanwhile, Roy Morgan states that OzBargain, “a wiki forum for visitors to share and vote on everything from online voucher codes, bricks-and-mortar retail store sales, supermarket specials, mobile phone and entertainment streaming plans, credit cards, flight deals, freebies and competitions”, is not far behind.
“Over the last few years, OzBargain has successively eclipsed many of the more traditional category players (as far as any online retail model can yet be called ‘traditional’), that variously offer aggregation, auctions, group buying and actual online stores,” Roy Morgan notes.
According to Roy Morgan, OzBargain ranks as Australia’s fastest-growing shopping-related website, with 948,000 unique monthly visitors, over 2.5 times as many as in 2012.
Number of Visitors to Shopping Websites
Source: Roy Morgan Single Source Australia, July 2015 – June 2016 n = 50,712 Australians 14+.
Michele Levine, Roy Morgan Research CEO, noted that in an average four weeks 8.3 million Australians now buy something over the internet, up 37 per cent (around 2.25 million online shoppers) since 2012.
“However, many shopping websites haven’t seen visitation rise in line with the overall appetite for buying online,” Levine commented.
“The two ‘category killers’ eBay and Amazon have each increased their unique monthly audience over the period, by around 5 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively – both well shy of the 37 per cent growth in online shopping generally.
“The big success over the last few years has been OzBargain, a community message board for like-minded bargain-hunters. The site doesn’t sell anything directly and instead acts as a hub for visitors (and merchants) to share information about sales and offers, whether online or in bricks-and-mortar stores.”
Levine noted that “nearly half of Australians agree they sometimes research products online, but then go buy them offline”, with the OzBargain platform success proving “that many consumers are deeply engaged in omni-channel shopping”.
“Where once we thought about traditional retailers needing to learn from the online upstarts, the flat or declining visitation to many of these shopping websites suggests that these former ‘disruptors’ could now learn a thing or two from their elder brethren about how to satisfy customers, how to advertise through a range of media, and how to entice new passers-by through the door – or to the webpage,” she commented.
